response 1 of 125:

Oct 1 17:33 UTC 1998

The ICNET link used to be Grex's only connection to the Internet.
We would dial in to ICNET, a local ISP in Ann Arbor, and connect to
a modem there at 28.8K bps.  The cost of the bandwith we used was paid
for by an anonymous donor, and Grex pays for the phone lines on each end;
$19.44 for the one on our end and $20 for the one on ICNET's end.

Since we got our ISDN lines a year ago the ICNET connection has
continued to be live, but no traffic is being routed over it.  Our ISDN
line is handling all of it, and at last report was about 50% saturated.

For the last few months I have been compiling data and statistics
on Grex's operating expenses and general income.  The bottom line I found
was that on average, over the last year, we have taken in about $80 more
per month in dues, donations, and auction proceeds than we have spent on
operating expenses.  While that was better news than I feared, $80/month
(= $960/year) is a good deal less than we have spent on upgrades over the
last year, and our expenses are likely to continue to rise unless we make
some changes.  My conclusion was that it would be prudent for us to cut
costs.

The board began discussing ways of cutting costs last April, and there
was an extensive online discussion in item:coop10,101 (oldcoop item 101).
Chief among the candidates for saving money were dropping the ICNET
connection and cutting some dialin lines.

The board discussed both of these at the last meeting and found that we
agreed more closely on dropping the ICNET line than on dropping phone
lines.  We decided to put off dropping dialins until we could come up with
a policy to decide how many we need; this will allow us to adjust upward
as well as downward as demand demands.

We decided to go ahead and drop the ICNET connection now.  Some of our
reasons were: 

1) Cutting the ICNET link will give us 50% more surplus in our operating
   budget (i.e., the margin should increase from $80/month to $120/month),
2) users will notice no difference as a result of it going away,
3) we didn't use it the two times we have temporarily lost our ISDN
   connection,
4) if we ever do lose our ISDN connection permamently there is no way we
   could fall back to it, because our usage has grown too dramatically,
   and
5) scg pointed out that the slow link had a lot of trouble receiving mail
   in the past, and probably won't be suitable for a mail machine in the
   future.
 
Since "fallback position" and "mail link" have been the two main suggested
uses for the ICNET connection, there didn't seem to be much point to
keeping it.

response 3 of 125:

Oct 1 18:27 UTC 1998

I had to leave before this decision was made, but I would have regretfully
voted in favor of dropping the ICNet link, too.  

It was very, very cool to have at the time but honestly it sounds like it's
become 100% liability at this point.  No point to hanging on to even the
nicest albatross.