Verizon Dumping Usenet Servers

"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company." - Lily Tomlin

That makes no sense.

All Usenet providers use the same bandwidth. It's a function of the content not the number of users.

Too much cost for too few users. Spend the $15/year and buy a Usenet subscription. If you want Usenet pr0n spend a couple of bucks more.

I logged onto the Verizon forum

Actually, with the increased levels of stoopid spam, and the otherwise low level of signal to noise in most of the newsgroups, and the increasing availability ond low cost of graphics-based user interfaces, perhaps the time has come for usenet to fade away into relative obscurity.

And that may actually be its means of salvation, as the spammers and clueless idiots find so little traffic among those stoopid enough to fall for their spam and scams and rantings, those few who still have access may be rewarded by a return to the good old days when there were only a few dozen posts a day, and those were mostly of high quality.

Otherwise, there are other forums that are more focused and active enough to be worthwhile, and also hard enough to access that the bots and subhuman dolts are excluded. And many of them have nice features that make them even more useful.

Paul (pissed but getting over it)

Well, I guess I'll have to go to Google Groups :(

You were just a little early. I received my email today that they are discontinuing the service... :-(

Charlie

It sounds like they are discounting the construction by more than

That depends on the existing utility poles. A three foot minimum clearance between utilities is required. Without that, workers can't safely install or maintain each utility or service.

In this area, it's top quality organic soil from 6" to 24" of depth, then red, blue, and various grades in between of clay with a few round rocks of varying sizes from 'tiny' to maybe 5-6" diameters interspersed. 900' elevation above sea level today, but not always so. Trenching is easy enough... I've dug some long ones myself with my backhoe here.

All that said, I still agree. It's probably discounted already so that they pick up part of the cost just to get us hooked up.

The cable they use near the house itself seems to be pretty high quality already and I have to imagine that if they put it in the ground it will be of still higher quality if they want to keep it low maintenence, later. We live in the middle of a forest system (my trees here are over 100' tall, with trunk diameters well over 3') so roots will be a significant issue in time. I would probably suggest placing it along the paved driveway edge and down a few feet. However, that's more than 1500' getting up to the house and they still need to worry about root systems, rabbits, and the like.

If they didn't have to worry about crafted impedances along the way, I'd imagine they'd want _armored_, _flooded_, and _jacketed_ coax. I have no idea if that exists for what they need, though. Beyond my pay grade. But it can't be cheap.

Jon

Why would you need 3ft distance between, say, telephone wires and coax? Now don't tell me that some union said so ;-)

Usenet has always had a maximum message size. Binaries are simply split into chunks (usually twice, e.g. a 200MB video might be split into 20x

It's easier to just filter anything which appears to be a binary (this is what my ISP does since they dropped binary support; they still offer all newsgroups including alt.binaries.*, but any binary posts are discarded).

Web sites are too conspicuous.

The biggest advantage of usenet is that content owners can't identify the poster without the aid of the entity operating the news server, and the server operators are generally treated as common carriers, and not liable so long they remove content upon notification.

My new news provider has a simple fix for that. They allow no messages to be larger than 100k and you are only allowed 100 posts/day. Enough for me but if I'd ever need more I can write and they'll bump that up. I believe they also filter out binary stuff but not sure, they do not carry binary groups.

The same would be true for regular web servers in countries with an, ahem, not so great judicial system where they allow the posting of just about anything. That, plus the use of some sort of proxy obfuscator and you get the same effect.

Regulation.

There are minimum spacings declared so that Joe Bloe pole climber does not accidentally get too close to an HV line while working up on the leased by the cable co pole space.

There are also minimum gaps for buildings and attic runs and other locations between power and communications lines.

Mainly so that power companies minimize liabilities. Some might say to reduce a noise figure, but it was mainly to keep communications linesmen from doing something dangerous due to having less training or experience than a properly trained power linesman.

The line max limit is 10,000 lines. I set mine to 9992.

Even a binary post is posted as text. That is what the Yenc and uuencode and uudecode are for.

That I knew. I wanted to know whether and, if so, why between all utilities. Telephone service and cable TV. In our vilage they run right in the same string, tied to the same steel cables to hold them.

So if Jon has power coming in via poles and several feet below the power lines his telephone wires come in they could string their coax where the phone cable runs.

A 1MB file gets broken up into 10,000 line "messages" and are perfectly legal, and the way it is done.

Them putting limits on something they claimed to give access to is retarded, and their solution is to kill it instead of earning the money they suck away from the sheep.

Your best bet short of a full on class action suit is to implore them to merely kill the binary groups.

I knew that right from sign-up. You can't sue someone about a thing that has been clearly spelled out in the contract.

Anyhow, binaries are de-facto dead, after an overzealous AG let off his tirade. Any media channel rises and falls with the number of participants and that number has plummeted, big time.

The carrier strands are supposed to be separate for each service. Here.

Public Utilities Commissions, safety standards, and the utilities decided they don't want anyone any closer to their hardware, and the utilities own the poles. If they have electric lines, they are owned by the electric company. If they only have phone lines, they are owned by some 'bastard bell' company.

You either agree, or they won't rent you the space under a 'Pole attachment agreement'. The MSO I worked for had to pay to replace a couple hundred short poles near Cincinnati, Ohio in the late '70s, or go underground. That meant heavy equipment to remove tons of rock between each pole and would have taken years to complete, if they could have got the permits. BTW, most utility poles in that area were classed R.I.P. or 'replace, in place. They had to set most of them with explosives, so when it was time to replace a pole, the old one was pulled, and the new one set in the same hole.

If you want to have real fun, try to convince a utility to let you mount a large and heavy NEMA cabinet on a pole some time.

Underground construction can double the cost to install. It is usually done in gray schedule 80 PVC conduit and requires vaults for line extenders. A 1500 foot build would need at least one line extender, and possibly another power transformer & UPS. There is flooded underground cable, but it is still used with conduit. Gophers have been known to chew holes in armored cable, and squirrels chew through the shield of aerial cables.

I wrote software about 25 years ago to design CATV distribution systems, but I doubt it would still load into a computer. It was written on 5.25" floppies for a Commodore 64. It allowed you to enter the distance, and chose the brand and type of coax, along with all passive and active devices we used. One design I did was a two mile run, and was under .5 dB from design to 'as built'.

Sure enough, less than 24 hours after posting this I got two copies of the announcement emailed to me by Verizon - they SUCK!!!!!! Of course, when I call them tomorrow they will deny ever telling me that it wasn't going away, sigh. I'm going to keep calling and try to get them to reduce my bill, but we all know that isn't going to work either, bigger sigh :-).

----- Regards, Carl Ijames