The Online World resources handbook

You pay little for a lot! http://home.eunet.no/~presno/bok/15.html
Web browser's local disk cache after having disconnected (or, by email after having
mailing them back to yourself).
Finally, we'll have to add time spent digesting the contents of the menu to make a
choice of what articles to read. Use your stop watch to arrive at your estimate.
If you on average spend 10 minutes per day on your news, and do it every
weekday throughout the year, then you'll have spent over 43 hours at the end of the
year.
If you pay US$10/hour to access the Internet, then the cost amounts to US$430.
Add the cost of connecting to the service by phone to get the total cost.
Items to consider
Retrieving information stored on your Internet access provider's hard disks will usually
go much faster than getting it from any other disks on the network.
The load and capacity on the pipes going from your access provider to other hosts
on the Internet will probably vary considerably, even within your own country,
depending on the time of day and day of the week. Therefore, when speed is a concern,
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Personally, I have accounts on three Norwegian ISPs, plus on CompuServe in the
United States. I connect to the latter by making a long distance call to Oslo in Norway.
Whenever the links from my local ISPs to Web servers in North America are
clogged, going through CompuServe typically gives much faster retrieval. In one recent
case, the local providers gave me the data at around 10 cps. Going through CompuServe,
I realized over 1000 bps! This more than made up for the extra cost of calling long
distance.
Pauses, delays and bottlenecks
Beware of pauses and delays in your transfers. They 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.
Let me explain using an old, but relevant example: Years ago, 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. So, regardless of my network speed, it was impossible to
achieve more than 120 cps.
This is why 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.
Today, I connect to a local Internet provider at up to 56,6 Kbps, but still data from
some remote Web servers crawl towards me at speeds as low as 10 cps. Using an ISDN
line would not give me the data noticeably faster. Bottlenecks en route from the source
determine the effective speed.
Try 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, read news from the services that you want to compare.
When a network service charging for volume (like Datapak) is part of a
comparison, measuring volume is particularly important. Do not assume to know the
answer in advance.
Always calculate the cost based on a fixed volume, like for transfer of
1000 characters. This is particularly important when you must use
different modem speeds to access competing services!
Network load varies considerably throughout the day depending on the number of
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