Lin Nah
VUW and Waikato were the two places bringing in usenet news into the country.
VUW Comp Sci was the one bringing news into NZ until some time after the Internet link landed in NZ (at Waikato).
Usenet news feed (and the payment of it) is probably what limited some of the growth of the .nz DNS and kept things manageable for Rex Croft.
DNS charging didn't start until 1996. Waikato and VUW did DNS updates on a grace and favour basis until then; VUW (which just had govt.nz, mil.nz and iwi.nz) continued to do so until 1997. Re Usenet charging and volume charging in general: Volume charging was what enabled Usenet and email to become as popular as it did. Similarly, the volume charged model for IP allowed sites to become connected to the NZ Internet and ship traffic over a very expensive piece of wet string that would not have been able to under other models. Right from the very beginning, I've heard the argument that volume charging "limited growth", often made quite stridently. When VUW started charging for fixed line access in January '93, monthly fees for an analogue line were about $80 across town, plus $150 for Internet access, plus international traffic at $2.50/MB less discounts for night and low priority traffic. Remember that this was before the web became popular, before email became full of multi-megabyte attachments, before spam and so-on; for example the whole of VUW, which didn't charge its users for traffic and was very liberal about who it allowed access to, and therefore was the largest single user in the country by more than a factor of two, only ran up 2.2 GB in March that year (much less in January & February). Half of that was FTP. About a third In 1993, the average Internet bill for a significant sized organisation connected via VUW, including telecomms, was less than $500/month. Even largest ones weren't paying much more than $2,000/month, e.g. the WCC, hooked up via 2 Mbps microwave with squillions of Citynet users banging away. I'd bet those organisations are paying significantly more now... NZ had, for much of the last decade, the one of the highest rates of per-capita Internet growth in the world. This is despite a small population and a vastly expensive national and international telecomms infrastructure. It's true that VUW pricing and policies were far from universal, and indeed a good deal of the growth was within the Wellington area. But within a short time Auckland Uni had connection policies and pricing closely mirroring ours. -- don - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog