Which usenet ?

Another thread?? Take a deep breathe and exhale....... :P

Usenet - cheap doesn't mean good. You need to look at a couple of things:
1) Retention - how long do they hold the posts? I've seen some places quoting 1000 days but then they have crappy completion....which leads on to the other thing
2) Completion - what percentages of their files are complete. Have 200 day retention with near 100% completion is better than 800 day at 50%.

Not having 100% completion on Usenet is not a problem thanks to PAR files, but obviously you'll want as much as you can.

Now, as for the throttling. There are possible ways around some throttling.
On Virgin Media if used NNTP port 119 or secure NNTP port 563 then you'd get throttled, but if you found a provider with access over port 443 VM though it was HTTPS traffic and didn't throtte.

You will need to find out specifically what BT throttles and what people using Usenet on BT are doing.

2 good providers off the top of my head are Astraweb & Giganews. You tend to find people love one and hate the other!! I used Astraweb a log time ago and it was good. I can't comment on Giganews.
 
Giganews is expensive (was a customer for about 1 year)
Astraweb in my experience has real problems with "incompletes (too many to be fixed even with PARs)" (was a customer for about 1.5 years)

currently I use Supernews since Xmas, no problems :)
 
PistolPete said:
Another thread?? Take a deep breathe and exhale....... :P

Usenet - cheap doesn't mean good. You need to look at a couple of things:
1) Retention - how long do they hold the posts? I've seen some places quoting 1000 days but then they have crappy completion....which leads on to the other thing
2) Completion - what percentages of their files are complete. Have 200 day retention with near 100% completion is better than 800 day at 50%.

Not having 100% completion on Usenet is not a problem thanks to PAR files, but obviously you'll want as much as you can.

Now, as for the throttling. There are possible ways around some throttling.
On Virgin Media if used NNTP port 119 or secure NNTP port 563 then you'd get throttled, but if you found a provider with access over port 443 VM though it was HTTPS traffic and didn't throtte.

You will need to find out specifically what BT throttles and what people using Usenet on BT are doing.

2 good providers off the top of my head are Astraweb & Giganews. You tend to find people love one and hate the other!! I used Astraweb a log time ago and it was good. I can't comment on Giganews.
Click to expand...

many thanks for the info ..
 
HEADRAT said:
Giganews is expensive (was a customer for about 1 year)
Astraweb in my experience has real problems with "incompletes (too many to be fixed even with PARs)" (was a customer for about 1.5 years)

currently I use Supernews since Xmas, no problems :)
Click to expand...

thanks and do you think it will be good for stopping p2p on BT as i don,t know anyone who uses it :(
 
jamjar said:
thanks and do you think it will be good for stopping p2p on BT as i don,t know anyone who uses it :(
Click to expand...

Usenet has nothing to do with p2p and BT do not throttle usenet. Or at least they don't throttle mine anyway, full speed all the time using newshosting.
 
So strange that different users experience different things.

I have used astraweb exclusively for nearly 2 years and can honestly count on one hand the number of incompletes i have had, for less than £7 a month i have 0 complaints.

A friend of mine uses supernews and he swears by them and cant be swayed at all.
 
I use Giganews and whilst it is expensive I like it due to massive retention, high speeds, VPN service and 30Gb online storage.

I know VM throttles the default NNTP SSL port but you can change it to the HTTPS port and it will work fine. BT may not *officially* throttle Usenet traffic but you need to check out it's policies on the particular ports in use.
 
Giganews has excellent service, completion and retention. Diamond accounts also come with a few extra goodies like remote storage and VPN facilities, but it isn't as cheap as some.
 
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