ISP usenet access

[emperorIX]

My ISP rules!

It just recently upgraded its usenet service giving its customers about 5.5-6 months retention @ 2 Mbps with very good completion. I hate paying for usenet access and have always relied on what my ISP gives me, speeds were slow, retention was low,and completion was decent for most groups. Now, this is a huge improvement over the crappy 1 month retention and 45 KB/s access it was previously offering.

Anybody else have positive experiences with their ISP's usenet service?

[sickest]

Anybody else have positive experiences with their ISP's usenet service?

yup, midco.net free access download @ about 2.5mb/sec dunno about retention... how i find that out?

[emperorIX]

Anybody else have positive experiences with their ISP's usenet service?

yup, midco.net free access download @ about 2.5mb/sec dunno about retention... how i find that out?

Since i don't use nzb's that often, I usually end up downloading all the headers in any given news group...not everything is nzb'ed. The oldest post will tell you how good the retention is. In my case, the oldest post was in October in a very active lossless group.

[mesaman]

Qwest is a telco covering a large area in western USA. I use Qwest's news server 'news.qwest.net' to download large posts, typically 4.7 GB and above, but I think I'm the only Qwest subscriber who does this. Sometimes another Qwest subscriber will even tell me that I'm not supposed to be able to do what I'm doing, for one reason or another.

[quadomatic]

AT&T newgroups have gotten better with the number of newsgroups they have, but their retention is SO bad.

[mesaman]

What groups were added by AT&T?

[quadomatic]

What groups were added by AT&T?

I don't think alt.binaries.tv, alt.binaries.multimedia, alt.binaries.mp3, or alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 were there before, but they are now.

[mbucari1]

a.b.boneless isn't in at&t

[ruby651]

From what I read online, my ISP, Cox, now has 1-month retention allowing 4 concurrent connections, which is a lot better than they were a year ago, and not bad for ISP newsgroup service, from what I've seen. I still think I'll stick with Usenetserver.

[munaaf]

my old isp had 120 days retention i think, with speeds ~175kb/s. it was the only reason i wanted to stick with them :P. they was BT but my new isp doesnt give usenet, so i jus use torrents :D

[mesaman]

Cox outsources newsgroups to Highwinds and Midco outsources to Giganews.

[4play]

BT have also outsourced to giganews. So 200 days retention but your limited to 3 connections at 60k each.

[quadomatic]

a.b.boneless isn't in at&t

Yes, and that's a shame.

[emperorIX]

So, I guess my experience is very unique. When I am only downloading content from usenet and not using any torrent client, I get a constant 8.0 Mbps (spiking to 10 Mbps at times) from my ISP provided usenet access. My speed decreases significantly when I am uploading at my max rate...it dips to about 2 Mbps. So, as a result I have been using usenet alot more than torrents. Completion is,so far, extremely good (I haven't had to use a par set yet), all binary groups as far as I can tell are accounted for, and retention is very good (~120 days, more for some groups). My ISP, as far as i can tell, is using Tweaknews.

I am loving my ISP atm, I hope it lasts.