J. Clarke wrote:
Jack Stein wrote:

So are you saying Comcast and Verizon will drop Usenet because they
can't afford the storage?

No, because by dropping USENET they can reduce both their
administrative and hardware support costs with minimal loss of income.

Really? How much does Comcast spend as a percentage of the
administrative and hardware expenses by providing free Usenet access to
all their customers?

Can your PC with 500 GIGABYTES in hard drive storage deliver up
binaries fast enough to satisfy a large number of simultaneous
users?
No, but Comcast can, and that is what they sell, and the large
graphics transported is the reason high speed providers exist.
Storage of Usenet is a non-issue to companies like Verizon and
Comcast.

So what is the relevance of your PC? You seem to be laboring under
the misconception that serving up large volumes of stored binaries is
just a matter of sticking a consumer drive in a machine.

The relevance has been made clear, but you choose to ignore what you
don't like or doesn't fit in your views. Lets see if I can waste some
time explaining it to you again.

Vincent said:
"Usenet has changed considerably since the late 1980's... more
newsgroups, more content, larger files, etc..."

I said this stuff has gotten much cheaper, you insist on arguing about
that. I mentioned an IBMPCxt cost $4000 with a 10 meg hard drive in the
80's. I replaced that 10 meg hard rive in the 80's for $400, which is
$40 per MEG. My current computer, which cost under $1000 has over 500
GIGS of HD storage. 500 GIGS of storage in the 80's when I bought the
HD at $40 a MEG would have cost lets see ..... $22,000,000, or 22
MILLION dollars. Someone can check my math, but when you are done
laboring over this concept, then you might understand why storage of
huge amounts of information is no big deal to the likes of verizon and
comcast.

Usenet has always been a loser for the ISPs.

Numbers please? I doubt even Comcast knows the exact value of Usenet
service to it's subscribers.

It's not
really enough of their business to warrant the expense.

How about free web space, is that enough to warrant the expense? How
about 6 free independent email accounts so a family of 6 can all have
their own separate email accounts? If you know all this about Usenet,
then I guess you know the answers to all these Questions...

Don't bet on it. USENET was around long before Verizon or Comcast.

Well, Verizon and Comcast was AT&T and they have been around longer
than Usenet, but so what?

Comcast was AT&T? Sorry, but Comcast is a cable television company
and they have never been a part of AT&T.

AT&T sold there internet service to Comcast. I was at an AT&T address,
next thing you know, I had a Comcast address. Just as Verizon, Bell
south, Southern Bell and some others came from AT&T, so did Comcast.

Why will the independents be dead?
Because not enough people will care enough to support them.

Note that there are free servers out there.

Fidonet was mostly free as well, but guess what... dead as a doornail.

My guess is Giganews gets a ton more money from Comcast than all the
individual subscriptions combined.

When you know for sure get back to us.

It was just a guess. Get back to "us" when you know the value of free
Usenet, free web space, and multiple email accounts to Comcast vs the
expense of providing all that free with your basic Comcast account.

They will likely be the first to fall if the
big ISP's drop Usenet, and most of the rest will be gone right
behind
them due to lack of interest. If only Verizon drops all binary
groups, their will be a huge dent to the alt binary groups to the
point that MOST if not all the binary groups will disappear, even
though Comcast still carries them.

This may come as a shock to you but neither Verizon nor Comcast is the
world.

Nothing shocks me, you must have me confused with someone else. More
over, I don't think I ever suggested Verizon or Comcast is the world.
I do think they are very big providers of internet service in the US.
If you know differently, please let "us" know who the bigger providers
are.

Regardless of how it goes, I feel confident storage of Usenet is a
non-issue as the price of storage has gone through the floor years
ago, and is still falling at an amazing rate.

Says the guy who has never seen a server farm.

I guess you are saying if I ever saw a server farm, I'd know that the
cost of storage since the 80's has NOT gone through the floor. You
would be wrong at any rate... The cost of storage has gone right through
the floor in just 25 years, to the point it is a non-issue to large
ISP's like Comcast and Verizon as far as Usenet is concerned. That's
why they can offer free web pages, multiple email accounts, and fee
Usenet to all their customers.

--
Jack
http://jbstein.com