SkyCache/Cidera replacement?

Mon Sep 20 20:30:01 UTC 2004

On Mon, Sep 20, 2004 at 03:15:47PM -0400, Jon Lewis wrote:
> Hadn't it gotten to the point shortly before Cidera folded that the
> satellite bandwidth was so insufficient for a "full feed" that it was of
> questionable value?...or was it still fine if you wanted a usenet feed
> with no binaries?

	Jon, I recall some reported problems along those lines.  That
even without binaries, they were running out of overhead.  Given that
USENET volume tends to grow, I'm betting that it would require a lot 
more capacity now.

	When I first talked to someone using SkyCache about 5 years ago,
at the time, they were a very happy customer because they'd been able
to offload 12-13 Mbit/s from one of their transit DS-3s by taking a 
SkyCache feed.

	However, that was late 1999 or so, and transit prices were
more than an order of magnitude higher than they are now.  In those
days, a lot of SPs were still running their own newsservers, and very
few companies were providing outsourced reader access to news.

	These days, it doesn't make a lot of sense for many SPs to
deal with the hassle of taking feeds and maintaining a newsserver,
so they outsource reader access for their 4 or 5 customers who are
aware that there is something besides the WWW out there.

	SkyCache was a really nice idea, but given that the number
of SPs running their own newsservers has shrunk considerably, and
that the outsourced news people won't be interested, the market is
much smaller overall.  On top of that, the bandwidth requirements
have increased, while transit cost has plummeted.  As a service,
it existed to mitigate the bandwidth requirements of running a
newsserver -- now that transit costs have crashed, and many more
people are outsourcing their news, I just don't see a viable
market in providing push feeds over satellite.  I don't know what
transponder space is running, but I'm willing to bet it has not
gotten much (if any) cheaper.

	--msa