Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!amdcad!ames!lll-lcc!unisoft!hoptoad!gnu
From: g...@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin,comp.mail.uucp,comp.dcom.modems
Subject: uunet "3 minutes minimum" impacts Telebit users
Message-ID: <4581@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 13 May 88 12:03:55 GMT
Organization: Grasshopper Group in San Francisco
Lines: 43

My last bill from uunet was for about 2 to 4 times as many minutes
as I could account for from my system login records.  I checked
this with Rick and he told me, for the first time, that uunet
has a 3 minute minimum charge, applied for both incoming and outgoing
calls.

Since we use a Telebit modem, the breakdown of calls in April was:

calls minutes (from "last Uuunet" output)
 139 00
  87 01
  19 02
   3 03
   2 04
   3 05
   4 06
   1 07
   2 08
   1 10

The above adds to 214 minutes; if the 0-minute calls are billed as
1-minute calls, the sum is 353 minutes.  This about half of the 756
minutes we were billed for outgoing calls.

Note that billing us for 3 minutes for each call is overcharging
for 99% of the calls.

I recommend that other Telebit uunet users change your dialing patterns
to avoid these overcharges.  There is no easy way to get uunet to
only call you when it has 3 minutes' worth of data to send (or,
say, once a day for less traffic than that), so I have switched back
to polling uunet twice a day.  That way I'm only charged for 6 minutes/day
unless I have more than about 400K of traffic that day.

In April my SYSLOG shows that we moved 5,537,547 bytes with uunet.
Since we were billed about $109 for this (not including the $30/mo
membership fee), it cost about $19/meg.  On Telebits, a meg moves in
about 15 minutes, so it should cost about $2 at $8/hr.  There is
certainly more overhead when moving smaller files around, but a factor
of 10 is too much!
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu        g...@toad.com
"Use the Source, Luke...."

Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!think!ames!ucsd!ucsdhub!esosun!seismo!rick
From: r...@seismo.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin,comp.mail.uucp,comp.dcom.modems
Subject: Re: uunet "3 minutes minimum" impacts Telebit users
Summary: hardly for the first time
Message-ID: <44311@beno.seismo.CSS.GOV>
Date: 14 May 88 03:28:08 GMT
References: <4581@hoptoad.uucp>
Organization: Center for Seismic Studies, Arlington, VA
Lines: 28

> as I could account for from my system login records.  I checked
> this with Rick and he told me, for the first time, that uunet
> has a 3 minute minimum charge, applied for both incoming and outgoing
> calls.

EVERY uunet subscription form ever distributed has said that there is a
3 minute minimum connect charge. I am looking at the original
subscription form that was sent in for hoptoad. It says quite clearly
(10 point type, centered on the page and offset from the rest of the
text by blank lines):

	There is a three minute minimum connect charge.

We start billing when uucico logs the "OK (startup)" message in the
logfile.  It takes at least a minute to reach this point (modem syncs,
login chat script run, protocol startup, etc). If the call doesn't
reach this point, it isn't charged for.

The three minute minimum is an artifact of Tymnet. Tymnet bills at
a 3 minute minimum. The awk script that does the billing currently
applies the minimum to all calls.

It may be necessary to adjust the minimum for the dialups. (Adjusting
the minimum may require raising the rate. The failed calls must be
paid for somewhere). However, note that a zero minute uucp session
is silly.

--rick

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