retention war

[UsenetGuy]

Okay, this is getting stupid now.

[Skiz]

:lol:

I'm loving this retention war.

[GWashington]

I call. And raise.

[cooldude75ph]

And I just switched from newshosting to astraweb.
Oh well. I hope the retention war escalates further :D

[saulin]

Yeah this is good, as long as it doesn't affect completion rate. Some companies like to promise more than what they can actually offer.

I remember usenetserver years ago tried to raise retention and it ended up with a lot of incompletes.

[Broken]

For $11 guaranteed for life, Astraweb is still the winner.
I certainly hope the retention war progresses into an equally spirited pricing war.

[iLOVENZB]

Soon Usenet will be the next best thing to scene access.

No scene politics and no ratios.

[UsenetGuy]

Soon Usenet will be the next best thing to scene access.

No scene politics and no ratios.

Soon? it already is. The "scene" as people call it is just a place for arrogant kids to hang out and brag about how leet they are (which as it seems, is not much). Why bother trying to get onto a scene ftp server when theres much better sources? :)

[GWashington]

I have to agree that it's already better due to ease of access and use.

[iLOVENZB]

Soon Usenet will be the next best thing to scene access.

No scene politics and no ratios.

Soon? it already is. The "scene" as people call it is just a place for arrogant kids to hang out and brag about how leet they are (which as it seems, is not much). Why bother trying to get onto a scene ftp server when theres much better sources? :)

But pre times for Usenet is nowhere near as fast as dedicated 0day trackers.

"Dr Dolittle Million Dollar Mutts 2009 DVDRiP XviD-DvF" was uploaded on public trackers before Usenet :O.

Also if you have scene access you won't 'miss' anything but the politics is a major drawback.

[Funkin']

Let the providers keep trying to one up each other on retention. That's better for us.

[Beck38]

Okay, this is getting stupid now.


Well... probably. But, for years I've gauged the pricing and such of machines via the cost of HD space, and although I'd say the effect of perpendicular recording technology is reaching it's stride right now, there's a couple more near-term HD types in the lab that are nearing 'first release', although the current economic troubles may delay them a bit.

Next level? 1000 days retention, really. Graph the size of storage v. cost, and we should be at 10TB/$100 level in about 2 years. Then 100TB/$100 a couple years after that. Then 1000TB... you get the 'slope'.

Now to get transmission levels/speed up to decent levels. All the storage space doesn't mean much if the network is stuck in the MB/s level.

AT&T is running the commercial on tv in the U.S. saying they have 'developed' a 40GBit network... Geez, that's reeeeeelllllyyyyyy slllllllllooooooow. Before I retired 7 years ago I was engineering 200GBit/second fiber networks that spanned oceans. And the tech for 2-3 times that existed, folks simply weren't going to spend the bucks (telecom bubble collapsed). Terabit systems may be built before 2010, if things don't collapse any more.

[grishnakh]

Well, the biggest threat of internet in the future is the lack of bandwidth. I hope usenet providers don't just try to focus on retention building and forgetting about bandwidth increase as the amount of subscirbers increase.

[Beck38]

Well, the biggest threat of internet in the future is the lack of bandwidth. I hope usenet providers don't just try to focus on retention building and forgetting about bandwidth increase as the amount of subscirbers increase.

Most providers (from Giganews to Astraweb to everyone else) have excellent commercial level multiple spans to multiple major internet backbones (read their ad copy). Usually at least multiple OC12-OC48, and most probably these days multiple OC192's (10Gbit).

The problem is, especially for those in the U.S., the 'last mile', i.e., from the central office (or cable-tv headend) to the subscribers. The 'gold standard' in that department (again, in the US), is FIOS, which has 50-100Mbit/s dedicated (non-shared like the cablecos) subscriber service, for around $100-150/month. Pretty steep, but their lower service (like 20/5), is <$50/month.

IF (oh, that word!) you are in a 'served area'. I have FIOS about 6 or so miles from my home, in a very small pocket of suburban landscape. Would be nice. I'm not going to move, though (!). FIOS covers about .001% of households in the US, and at around $3500 per potential subscriber passed (current build costs from Verizon), it's not going to grow super-fast.

But copper-based technology (DSL) still has a lot of breath left in it. Qwest (another US telco) is busy rolling out 20/5 DLS (that's 20Mb/s downstream, 5Mb/s upstream) service throughout it's 14-state area. The key is getting fiber plowed (which Qwest, as originally a long distance carrier before it bought into local telco), is handy at (I did lots of Engineering for them years ago)into neighborhood terminals, then copper from that point.

Of course, the cablecos are rolling out 50Mb/s service with Docsis3.0, but that is a SHARED service. P2P need not apply. And neither does any other traffic when their Pay-per-view service runs a new movie that everyone wants, as they do active bit sharing (of course!) that steals bit-space from the 'bulk' services like internet to the much more profitable 'on-demand'.

Things will get better. I'll go out on a limb and say speed will double about every 5 years or so, overall, for those at least not really out in the boonies. For me, I actually can get faster DSL (actually about 3x faster) at my vacation home than I can where I live, due to simply better equipment their by the telco. I plan on moving there full-time by next year, if things don't accelerate the current economic collapse.

!!! I just had an OMG moment... OC768 (40GB) is now in use by AT&T, THAT'S what the press release said...! But not really widespread as of yet. And it is in use on the TAT14 trans-atlantic fiber, plus some inter-country loops around Europe and the US.

Geeez, get out of the industry for a few years and things are whizzing by...! But they still have some way to go, as a lot of the trans-pacific fiber is well over 200GBits, but the largest cap 'wave' (the individual carrier wavelengths) are only 10GBit each.

[buscuitboy]

Wow, check out this news bulletin/post for Newsdemon on their blog. Its about their new retention levels. Best I've seen yet in these retention wars. SUPER LONG retention of 11000 days. NICE......

http://www.newsdemon.com/blog/2009/04/01/newsdemon-announces-retrocative-11000-day-retention-on-all-newsgroups/

wink, wink!!!! check out the date too. I thought this was funny & alomst fell for it. Maybe someday though.

[darkstate01]

Thanks buscuitboy I now have Rick astley's tune rattling around in my head..NNNOOOOOooooo....

[zot]

In about another 2-3 years (my estimation) the "retention war" will be completely over. That's because by then, assuming current trends hold, the major usenet providers will no longer be retiring articles from their servers at all.

They're not far at that point now, NSPs currently spending on average about 6 months of the year spooling up, and the other 6 months retiring articles. Highwinds current ongoing spool-up will be 300 days [going from 100 to 400 days retention] - that's almost a solid year of retention being added in one operation.

When server capacity is added at greater than the rate of posting volume, and never allowed to lapse, at that point then retention essentially becomes non-expiring.

It's even possible that Highwinds might not stop at 400 days (they originally planned for 250d retention at the start of their current upgrade) and instead just keep adding another 150 days of capacity, then another 150 days, ...

In the meantime, there could even be a race between providers to see who can be the first to reach the point of "no-article-deletion" status. In this "sprint to the finish" maybe September 2008 will mark the date of the oldest binary articles ... forever!

... just something to think about :)

[dontango]

Usenet has allready adapted to high retention levels. Some years ago one would find each given tvshow or movie being uploaded numerous times. Now its mostly one irc-based group that uploads all new stuff once and never again, 230 days at giganews seems to be fair enough until a better rip shows up....

[UsenetGuy]

Who the hell edited my post? It was called Newshosting Announces 400 Day Retention Commitment and had text from the NewsHosting website and a link.

Seriously, do NOT edit my posts like that. If I wanted it to be named retention war and just one line of text then I would have posted it like that. Which ever stupid mod/admin did it, own up to it and give me a reason why you did it.

[Buschwusch]

as long as the speed is still good, it's fine with me :-)