In article ,
Upscale wrote:
"Doug Payne" wrote in message
10 years. By contrast, Usenet news traffic has gone from 16% of our
total Internet bandwidth consumption in 1996, to almost unnoticeable
today at about 0.3%.

Assuming your figures are correct, then it would have been a classy act for
them to continue the providing of usenet access for those old-timers who use
it. Also assuming your figures are correct, the small percentage of users
who use it would be consuming negligible bandwidth.

Unfortunately, that last statement is *NOT* true.

there isn't a lot of bandwidth consumed _reading_ news, because it's
a very small (comparatively speaking) number of uses.

The _incoming_feed_ to the news-server is an entirely different story.

Present-day, the load is a *sustained 130+megabits/second. 24 hours/day.
7 days/week. Thats about 1.4 _terabytes_ of *new* messages every day.

And about 12 terabytes of disk required to hold 'history' for *seven* days.

Unless you have _lots_ of users, you simply cannot afford to run anything
like a 'full feed' news-server these days.

Rogers could have
capitalized on it as a "reward" for the continued support of their
customers. I dare say that if you put Lee Valley Tools in place of Rogers,
usenet access would have continued unabated.