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The NetNews BoF formed at RIPE 23 which took place during 1996 in Amsterdam.
It was chaired by Willi Huber and called together on the suggestion of Felix Kugler, the news administrator of SWITCH.
During the BoF, Willi gave a short presentation about the problem at hand. Afull newsfeed at present uses 110kbit/s average bandwidth with peak days at 150kbit/s on average. Netnews is an overlay network much like MBONE. With such a sustained load it becomes very beneficial to prevent multiple simultaneous full feeds across many parts of the physical infrastructure. This is an inter-provider coordination problem. Today there does not seem to exist even a mailing list for European netnews administrators.
There was consensus that RIPE should coordinate this even though netnews is clearly an application and many news administrators do not usually attend RIPE meetings.
There was also consensus to propose the establishment of a working group for the purpose. It was noted that working groups can easily be closed should there be no activity.