virgin media Uk usenet access questions?

[jefffisher]

my friend just moved to england.

she is completely stupid as hell so i can't really have her help me help her set her up.

does anyone know retention and whatever else for news.virginmedia.com?

[anon]

Apparently, it's either 7 or 120 days of retention with a maximum of 5 connections. That's what I found on Google, but those posts were from 2008.

You could ask them via e-mail, that should clear all doubts.

[jefffisher]

that's all i could find too, i was hoping someone who actually had it would reply.

[Lindy]

I'd say to try over on http://community.virginmedia.com/ (Virgin's own support forum) but from what I remember about a six months ago when I helped someone else set theirs up the speed was good but the completion poor. I've been an annual AstraWeb subscriber for about four years now and Virgin is my ISP

[jefffisher]

they have a highwinds backend, completion can't be that bad. i mean yeah bad but not isp run server bad.

[the mighty]

Retention is 7 days. It doesn't support SSL. No username or password needed, just use news.virginmedia.com as the server and connect.

[stoi]

I am pretty sure they dont support binaries either you only get text groups now, but i havnt used it in years since i signed up for astraweb.

[jefffisher]

thanks for the info mighty =]

stoi they definitely have all the binaries i just wasn't sure about retention.

[zot]

news.virginmedia.com traces to Highwinds' Amsterdam usenet server.

Although I have no personal experience with Highwinds ISP-spec. Amsterdam server , I know that with some American ISPs that use Highwinds, the header retention [depending on group] is only around a week or so (has been for many years) but the article body/NZB retention was somewhere around 100 days the last time I checked. (Also, bandwidth can be expected to be throttled to 512K or 1Mbit [depending on plan], but not consistently: sometimes the door is left wide open.) Overall, I consider it very good for a free ISP usenet service, and even better when you add a block account.

BTW, Highwinds ISP-spec usenet service has always included binaries (even all those groups with disgusting names) but I suppose an ISP could request a censored subset or text-only groups if they really wanted.