Chapter 15: You pay little for a lot!

===================================== Calculating costs ----------------- Those living in Norway may read up to twenty-six pages of news from Associated Press in the United States and Financial Times (England) for US$ 0.64, or less. The trick is to dial long distance to a 9600 bps node in Sweden when the telephone company and CompuServe's non-prime time rates are in effect. At 9600 bps, you may transfer text at up to 960 characters per second. One page of text (size A-4) holds around 2200 characters. A typical news story is one to two pages of text. | Users watching the 'taximeter' can use online services at a | | very low cost. For many, global communication is almost free.| Reading exactly the same news through another network or service, may cost you 300 percent more. Through yet another online service, the cost may double again. A full issue of the NewsBytes newsletter is around 150,000 characters, or 68 pages of text. Retrieving it from a local BBS typically costs me around 29 cents. Retrieving the full text from CompuServe would cost me over 500 percent more. Using NewsNet for the job, at 2400 bps through Datapak, would increase my current cost by more than US$30.00. The time of day may be important. Some services have different rates for access during the day, the evening, and the weekend. Use your calculator often. When you pay by the minute -------------------------- When using bulletin boards, phone charges are often the only cost items. Some boards require a subscription fee for full access to the system. Still, it is easy to calculate the costs of your calls. Divide the subscription fee by an estimated number of calls, and add to the cost of using the phone. The same applies to users of CompuServe. Their total cost is simply the sum of all connect charges, any network charges (to CompuServe and others), part of the basic subscription fee, and local phone rates (for direct dialing to the service, or to reach the network's node). Where a service uses a monthly subscription rate, add part of this to the time charges. Distribute the rate using an estimated number of online hours per month. Example: You pay US$30/hour to access a service during prime time. Your modem speed is 240 cps. Theoretically, if the data flows without pauses at system prompts, you can transfer 392 pages of text in one hour. Even when you deduct some characters due to stops in the transfer, the resulting transferred volume remains respectable. To transfer one page of text takes around nine seconds (2200 characters divided by the speed, which is 2400 bps, or about 240 characters per second). The cost is nine cents. A given binary file (a program) is 23552 bytes large. Using the XMODEM protocol, you can transfer it in about four minutes and thirteen seconds. The cost is US$2.10. To find the cost when paying by the minute is simple. Just calculate the cost per minute or second, and multiply by the estimated connect time. On many services, it will take a minute or two before you can start to receive text or files. Disconnecting also takes a few seconds. Add this to the connect time when calculating costs. Pauses and delays in the transfer can be caused by you or others, and may have a dramatic impact. It is particularly important to take this into account when comparing alternatives using different networks. Example: Transfers to TWICS via Datapak at 9600 bps rarely gave me higher effective speeds than 100 cps. The reason was that the connection between the Japanese telcom network and TWICS went through a 1200 bps gateway. A high speed connection to your data transporter's network does not guarantee a high speed connection to the remote computer. I used to go through Datapak at 9600 bps to a computer center in Oslo. There, I was connected through a local area network to the host computer. The effective speed was rarely higher than 4800 bps. Calling direct gave twice the speed. Try to measure the effective transfer speed before selecting a routing for your data. Transfer the same amount of text through various networks. If future transfers are likely to take place at a given time of day, test at that time. If your planned application is retrieval of programs, retrieve programs. If you want to read news, then read news from the services that you want to compare. When a network service charging for volume (like Datapak) will also be part of a comparison, measuring volume is particularly important. Do not assume that you know the answer in advance. | NOTE: Always calculate the cost based on a fixed volume, like | | for the transfer of 1000 characters. This is particularly | | important when you need to use different transfer speeds to | | access competing services. | Network load varies considerably throughout the day depending on the number of simultaneous users, and their applications. This also applies to online services. The load is normally lowest, when the bulk of the users are asleep, and during weekends. When the load is low, you get more done per minute. Planning and self-discipline pays off ------------------------------------- The actual cost of using a given set of services depends a lot on your self-discipline, the tools you use, and on how well prepared you are: * If accessing manually, use "quick" commands rather than menus to move at maximum speed to desired sources of information. * Do not set your services to be used with colors, sound, or special methods for displaying graphics, unless you have no choice, or are willing to pay the extra cost. They increase the volume of transferred text, and lower effective speed. * Get the information and disconnect. It is expensive - and usually unnecessary - to read captured text while online. Log off to read. Call back for more to read, disconnect, and then call back again. * Learn how to write your mail offline, and send the letters "in a batch" to your mailbox. Your messages will often have fewer typing errors, be better thought out, and the cost will be considerably lower. * Consider automating your communication (see Chapter 16). I use Bergen By Byte this way. A while ago, it gave me the following progress report: "Time on: 17 hrs 43 min, today 0 hrs 0 min, total 827 times." In average, I spend around 1.3 minutes per call. Yesterday, I was connected for 2:48 minutes. The result was 106 kilobytes' worth of conference mail. Modem speed and cost -------------------- 2400 bps is a sensible modem speed for some applications, and used to be a good starting point for new onliners. The benefits of using a faster modem may be marginal under the following conditions: * When navigating the online service considerably reduces the effective speed, and you access the service manually. * When you pay considerably more for access at higher speed. (CompuServe charges extra for 9600 bps access, but not much.) * When your networks do not offer higher speeds. * When the relative price of a faster modem in your country is prohibitive. On the other hand, a modem doing 9600 bps or more, does give you considerably faster communication. If doing things faster is more important than keeping costs down, then it is a wise investment. This is the case for me. Besides, often it is definitely cheaper. Your applications have a considerable impact on your costs. If you mainly use your modem for retrieval of programs and large data files from bulletin boards - and don't have to pay extra for volume - then higher modem speeds will immediately give reduced costs. A slower speed modem may also stop you from getting what you want. For example, there are several shareware programs on my board that users of 2400 bps modems are unable to download within their allotted 30 minutes per day. When you pay for volume ----------------------- Some network services, like Datapak in Norway, have high rates for volume, and very low rates for connect time. When using such services, automatic communication becomes less useful. Rather than connecting, getting a piece of information, disconnecting, and then going back for more, you may find it cost efficient to review menus and results while online. When paying for volume, the online service's menus become luxury items. Using quick commands for navigating is cheaper. Your comparisons will never be accurate when comparing with services charging for connect time. It is particularly difficult when the measure of volume is 'packets' rather than 'number of characters transferred'. Datapak and many other PDN services reports your sessions like this: CLR PAD (00) 00:00:14:55 537 75 These numbers say that you have been connected to a service for 14 minutes and 55 seconds, that 537 data 'packets' have been received, and that 75 have been sent. Use these figures to calculate the cost of the call. | One data 'packet' or segment contains up to 64 characters. | | Think of it as a measure of the number of lines. Each line can | | have a maximum of 64 characters. If you send the character A | | and a carriage return, then this also counts as a segment. | | | | Consequently, it is hard to use the Datapak record to estimate | | the real number of characters transferred. All we know is that | | 537 + 75 segments were transferred, and that 612 segments may | | contain up to 39,168 characters. | When calculating the cost of a direct call, just the number of minutes counts. Use the time reported by the online service, and not your stop watch. CompuServe gives this type of report: Thank you for using CompuServe! Off at 10:11 EST 24-Nov-92 Connect time = 0:15 If the size of your log file was 15 KB after the first test, and 11 KB after the second, then just adjust the latter to compare (Actual Cost/11*15). It is easy to compare services that only charge by the minute. More practical hints -------------------- It is more expensive to call a service daily "to check the news," than to call it once per week to retrieve the same stories. Navigating by menus is more expensive than going directly to a source, or going there by stacking commands (i.e., combining quick commands into one). Many services let you read selective items in conferences by entering a search string. On my BBS, the following command r extended 100+ c lets you read all messages containing the search string 'extended' in the text starting with message number 100. If you forget the "c" parameter, the flow will stop after each message. This will reduce the average effective speed. Always use "nonstop" commands when reading stories, conference items, and other texts. Now, read the next chapter.