SkyCache/Cidera replacement?

Dan Mahoney, System Admin danm at prime.gushi.org
Mon Sep 20 23:54:09 UTC 2004


On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, Majdi Abbas wrote:

I'll bite, and reveal my ultimate cluelessness here.

Assuming I wanted to go about setting up an NNTP server, how would I go 
about getting and maintaining the feeds?  There's no "central" authority 
AFAIK, but does anyone have any knowledge as to relative price and/or 
bandwidth consumption?

-Dan


>
> 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
>

--

<Zaren> Christ almighty...  my EYES!  They're melting!

-Zaren, Efnet #macintosh, in response to:

www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Classroom/1944
The WEBSITE DESIGN class that gave my fiancee a D.

--------Dan Mahoney--------
Techie,  Sysadmin,  WebGeek
Gushi on efnet/undernet IRC
ICQ: 13735144   AIM: LarpGM
Site:  http://www.gushi.org
---------------------------




More information about the NANOG mailing list