Chapter 15: You pay little for a lot! =====================================
Calculating costs
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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.