Astraweb problems again

[Hypatia]

Thanx for the info.

Seeing as you have identified the retention ranges that have problems , perhaps, you could send them a note or something.They practically know you now and trust your findings.

[pinhead1000]

I've sent an email to Astra letting them know of my issues and I have to try both us and eu servers and send them a log off my newsreader

[Hypatia]

Is it only me or AW has limited (again) upload speed to 5+MB.? Remember they did this several times back then when their servers started getting lots of missing articles (especially during upload process)? They claimed that some users were hammering their servers (I guess uploads via VPS). I dunno maybe it's just me experiencing some problems atm.

[Beck38]

Since my pathetic ISP (Comcast) barely exceeds that level (5Mb/s) of upload speed without (quite literally) throwing my cc or wallet at them every month (current costs are now up to $125/month for 25/6, to get the the next 'tier' of 50/10 is double that amount which I'm not going to pay) I don't see any speed problems, even going 24/7 at max uploading.

If I can ever get moved from my current location, my primary reason is to get on (at least) 30/30 fios for less than half the bucks I'm shelling out to Comcrud. They also have 100/100 as well for about half Comcrud. I'm sure I've mentioned before, that FIOS is right at the entrance to my cul-de-sac but neither Verizon (when they were running it) or Frontier (current owner) will plumb down the street due to non-competitive agreement with Comcrud. Luckily, I've had satellite for TV for 35 years, as my street is not under any 'no satellite' deed restrictions which is probably the reason why it's under the non-competitive agreement.

Put in a ticket to Astra as well, don't really think it does any good at this point. It will either get better on it's own, or not.

[DngrMs]

^ holy crap that's expensive for bandwidth.

Using a basic conversion to US$ for an unlimited u/d account:

In one region I'm at around US$37 for 120/30 (copper - CBD).

In my other primary region (different Continent) it's about US$80 for 100/25 (glass - CBD).

Sucks hard to be raped for bandwidth.

[Beck38]

^ holy crap that's expensive for bandwidth.

The US is a BIG country. Get outside the big cities (>1M households) and the average distance to a telco Central Office is something like 35,000 feet, so even low speed DSL is, without large scale deployments of DSL extension cabinets and the like, a non-starter, and that leaves coaxial cable and/or fiber, and most telco's blew off fiber deployments throughout the 70's to today, simply because they could keep their copper plants generating revenue.

Now with a good chunk of their old subscribers moved to wireless/cellular, I know they wished they'd spent those years deploying that fiber, as most traditional telco's are now scraping the bottom of the barrel, barely keeping alive.

Add to that all the 'tricks' the cablecos use to stop any true competition, and most folks are left with no competition and those high rates.

[DngrMs]

Add to that all the 'tricks' the cablecos use to stop any true competition, and most folks are left with no competition and those high rates.

^ probably this.

[DigDawg]

Yeah - Astraweb seems to be on a 'permanent' shit completion path.
And yes, I am utilizing both of their US and EU servers, and yes, I have a completely separate fills server which gets depleted almost immediately because of their issues.
I think Astraweb might be a poor choice for provider going forward.
I'm moving on to another unless by some work of magic they clear up an issue they've obviously had for quite a while now.
It's a shame too, because they were the best out there - I've been with them forever and they were always top tier and quick to fix the rare occasional issues that sprung up.

(Note: these are two recent posts using NZB directly created by the poster whom I've downloaded 100% from Astra MANY times in the past. Others using same NZB on other Usenet SP have been DL fine.)

[Summerisle]

Shame about Astraweb. When I joined a few years ago they were pretty close to being 100% reliable. Right now, none of their servers work well for me with missing pieces approaching 10% on a regular basis. I'm still completing files most of the time but resorting to a fill server is becoming more common. I guess I'll be looking fir an alternative sooner rather than later.

[Beck38]

The folks currently running (I'm talking 'day to day' plant operation, not the 'suits' pushing paper) can't see the forest for the trees.

Every time anyone complains about poor completion, they simply ask 'what file?' and figure that it's only one little part that's hosed and not any large part. They don't seem to know anything about statistical analysis.