Astraweb - using Euro server only? (from USA)

First time poster here, hello.

A decade ago I was a heavy usenet subscriber. I eventually faded out with many new things coming along that in my mind made usenet less necessary. Recent things I have observed have convinced me to make a move back toward usenet. Seems a lot has changed in the past 5 years!

After reading many threads here I decided on Astraweb. Upon signing up, I noticed they have 3 servers: "general," USA and Europe. As a resident of the USA, it occurred to me that connecting to only European servers might be a "safer" option with certain concerns in mind (one of the appealing things I read about AW was their being headquartered in Singapore and the extra security that might entail).

Is anybody doing this, or is it overkill? Or maybe even not viable in terms of content completion?

It is not illegal to download copyrighted material in the US. It is illegal to share/upload it.

(Has anyone even ever been prosecuted for posting/uploading (non-childpr0n) to Usenet?)

If you are just downloading, connect to the SSL server (ssl-us or ssl-eu) to avoid having your bandwidth throttled by your ISP. Sometimes I try different servers (eu vs. us), as sometimes content will be available on one & not the other.


Forgot to add: Welcome!

Barring special considerations (such as what OldIronTits said about differing content) I can't comment on, it seems to me that using an EU server when you're on the US is unnecessarily choosing a higher-latency route. One of the joys of Usenet is that you can leech without uploading, and that already minimizes your chances of getting caught.

Even SSL already sounds like overkill to me, but I live in a country that is relaxed about all this, so do correct me if I'm wrong.

Take a look at your ping times and throughput analysis on 'crossing the pond'. That's gotten better with every new fiber link (and the newest ones are rated at multi-gigabits of throughput), but unless your ip path is crawling across the U.S. (like from the east coast to SanFran where Astra/US is located), probably the best thing is to put the us-ssl server as primary, and put the eu-ssl as the secondary, then as third, put your 'fills' server in.

But set it up so that it uses your 'unlimited' account first, shortest route then longest.

Astra/US has had it's problems lately, but unfortunately those 'migrated' to the eu server as well. Hopefully, they learned their lesson that 'cross-pollination', while a fairly decent idea, needed to have a bit more cross-checking built into the routine than they had.

ive been having problems with AW EU for 1-2 hours already
Speed is low, but what is more important connections just keep dying. I download something then it drops to zero for some time.

Generally speaking I always thought latency didn't matter for downloading... only live action things like gaming. I was downloading at a constant 20Mbps from AW EU last night, faster than torrent, filelocker, etc... probably the fastest I've downloaded anything in my life. :-) I'm pretty sure bandwidth is all that matters here.

No problems so far with completion, but I haven't grabbed much yet.

Latency has a bit to do with your overall bandwidth yes. The stream of data isn't continuous, it's sent in packets, which has announcements from origin confirmation from the receiving end. If the latency was high, dropped packets or not, your bandwidth will start to suffer due to delay and overhead. It won't be major or damning though, just a little bit off the top.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by fakejohnson

After reading many threads here I decided on Astraweb. Upon signing up, I noticed they have 3 servers: "general," USA and Europe.

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And they only have two server farms: US and EU. The "general" setting will simply pick the closest farm to you via geo-location using your IP address. So avoid using something non-specific if you want to guarantee where your downloads will be coming from. Not that I think it will make any difference just like the other posters have said.

Latency affects speed a great deal when downloading on a single connection but high latency has very little adverse effect when using multiple connections because the "waiting period" of each connection is offset by the overlap of packet arrivals of the other connections . I've always been able to max out my bandwidth on either US or EU servers -- the only difference being that the more distant server requires a higher number of connections to achieve the same bandwidth saturation.

But I suppose it's quite possible that people who have hyper-fast internet service (30 to 100 megabit+) might only be able to max-out on a close server, given that most usenet accounts limit the number of connections.