Doug Freyburger writes:

"Cheri" gserviceatinreachdotcom wrote:
Yes, I give it about six months until the others follow...right after
they put themselves in the position to be a *paid provider.*

UseNet is too low budget for that. With individual.net charging
10 Euros per *year* it takes thousands of subscribers to
justify one junior engineer running the servers and tens of
thousands of subscribers to build a server farm. Even charging
$10 per month as an extra service few can justify the head
count.

And there's just no reason for it. When connections were slow and
bandwidth expensive, it made sense to have a newsfeed trickling in all
day so your users could connect to your local server at a decent speed.
I used to run my own news server at home for that reason. (Still do;
but that's because I'm a geek, not because there's any reason to now.)

At today's speeds and pipe sizes, users can't even tell a difference
between connecting to news.my-own-isp.com or news.somewhere-else.com.
With nationwide ISPs, the latter might even be closer or faster than the
former. It doesn't really make any more sense now to offer your users a
local Usenet feed than it would to offer them a local copy of wikipedia.



--
Aaron -- 285/244/200 -- aaron.baugher.biz