News Server Information?

[Codster314]

Hello;

I am just curious on how News Servers work. My ISP only allows me to download a certain amount of data per month. Would downloading from my ISP's newserver count towards this download quota?

I think a news sever would be the same as conntecting to another other server (web server)
So connecting to a ISP news sever, and connecting to a ISP web server would be the same, and both would count towards my download quota.

Same with connecting to a Japanese news server and a Japanese web server. Both count towards download quota?


A friend of mine says an ISP news sever doesn't cost anything for the ISP (They do not pay the "Government" he says, for use of the internet network) so it would not count towards the download quota. He says connecting to the ISP news sever (you would not need internet to do so, if the ISP cut off your internet usage, you could still connect to the ISP news sever (even though you can not connect to the ISP web page) so it doesn't count towards download quota? Is this correct?


Do you need internet to download from a ISP news sever?
Would downloading from a ISP newsever be any different from download from a ISP web server?

Thanks,


Code

 

[ncotton]

You do need "internet access" to connect to any external machine. Your digital traffic down the phone line is accepted by your ISP and converted into HTTP/FTP/ICMP/SMTP/POP etc. If you do not have an INTERNET connection, there is no session open for you to access their routing factilities.

Quota limits are placed on your account. All traffic that passed through your account will be accepted as "internet traffic", whatever/where ever it is. So as a rule, Your friend is wrong, unless... Your ISP specifically say that anything downloaded from their servers do not count (as a customer service thing, where they apply rule to the filter, like "anything from our private address is ignored". However, this is not a technical standard, it depends on your ISP, best thing to do is contact them.

Hope this was useful to you.

Hope this Helps.

Neil J Cotton
njc Information Systems
Systems Consultant

 

[ncotton]

BTW....quotas are put as no reason limits on your account, for nother other reason than, if you download alot, you will want to pay more for their more expensive, higher limit package. The reason it makes a difference is that they have to rent the bandwidth from the telephone exchange. I haven't looked it up recently, but for example, when broadband first was introducedat 128kbps, they had an average of 2Mb/s at each local junction (these are green boxes on the end of your street - not your local exchange) [NOTE - Im talking about UK only here]. This was then split between the local accounts, that access that junction. This would give you the average contention of 20:1 (20 users to one junction). As this interface is hardware, ISP would have to rent some of these, shall we say, "resevered slots", the more traffic they have to process, the more "slots" you need. Hense limiting the ammount of data you can download, limits their need for as many "slots", therefore reducing their rental costs....and so on. Now junctions are digital and handle about 200mb/s (on last count, 2 years ago)

Hope this Helps.

Neil J Cotton
njc Information Systems
Systems Consultant