News Server Recommendations
 

With the ntl newsgroups so bad at the moment, I have tried alternative providers but they are just as bad. The ones I am using at the moment are http://newsreader.com/ & http://www.100proofnews.com/. Both of them are just too slow, every now and then they will have a burst of speed but I am not impressed by any of them. It has taken 16hrs to download 650mb from 100proofnews, if I was downloading from ntl it would have taken less than 4 hours.

Although the ntl news servers are bad, at least they were quick when you managed to get a connection, 120k downloads all the time.

I would appreciate any recommendations of other usenet providers that I can try. They have to be fast all the time, not just for five minutes. I have taken a look at http://www.news-service.to and it looks to be pretty good, any comments?

Depends what you're after I use www.claranews.com
They have a monthly/annual charge...depending on how much you want to download...I originally went for 20gb per month just before NTL capped us (Doh!!!)

http://www.giganews.com/

I downloaded Stargate last night at 710 kb/s. They are wicked.

Now that's what I call at DL rate...what speed do you subscribe too?

I average 71 kb/sec with NTL600K

Also, missed in original post - Welcome IRON25:wavey:

I haven't subscribed to any news but that speed is wicked.
:D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D

Works connection? :eek:

I have tried http://www.news-service.to and although they are good & fast they have a 9gb max daily limit which sounds great except this is over all 17 servers, so once you hit about 500mb you have to try another server. This is a real pain. Looks like another cancellation coming.

What I am after is a provider where I can get good speed connections >100k and also one that has no download limit.

Giganews looks goods but seems rather expensive compared to other providers.

Did look at Claranews before but they don't seem to have a good reputation, is this true? Can someone comment on there speed & retention.

Thanks for the comments so far, any other suggestions would be appreciated.

I have cable internet, 6 Mbps. My theoretical cap is 768 kb/s but I never seem to get higher than 730 or so. Buh. And no, this is at home. At work we have a measily 3 Mbps (two T1 lines).

Giganews is a bit expensive, but to me it is well worth it. They used to be $15.95 for 8 GB and $22.95 for 12 GB. I switched between the two packages a few times depending on my need. Recently though, they changed their packaging to be cheaper for more downloads.

See, I use my ISP's news server, and get the "fills" from Giganews. That way I keep the consumption down.

I don't think Giganews have a download speed cap though. But I love them dearly and think they are an excellent company.

http://home.cogeco.ca/~johannj/personal/giganews.jpg

Wow, dons coat and grabs passport!

I use Claranews 20GB monthly and Astraweb's pay per GB service. I think that Claranews is capped at 450kb/s per connection, not really a problem if you only have the 600kb CM service.

yet another reason to run off to canada :p

its become my fav desination to visit for other reasons as well ;)

I recently moved from using www.eurofeeds.com , which was costing me about £11 a month for 25gb, to the www.claranews.com unlimted service for not much more.

I have noticed a considerable difference with retention tho, claranews seems to be only about 3 days, where as Eurofeeds was well over a week for the popular binary groups. But at least i can download as much as i want now. Speed is fine also, get 117k on my 1mbit conny. :)

I use Easynews (fast and very easy to use, 30 day retention but only a 6 gig monthly transfer) and News2Me (a little more fiddly to use, seem's to miss some files that easynews has but has a 50 gig monthly transfer, not sure on retention, I think (THINK) it's a month as well), couple these with binnews.com, newzbin.com or nfonews.com and you're onto a winner ;) Oh, and they're both $9.99 (about 6 quid) a month.

I am currently connecting & downloading fine from the NTL news servers:eek:

However, I don't know how long this will last for:shrug:

So at the moment, the best bet looks to be claranews. I'm not too bothered about a short retention period, what I am after is a fast connection >100k and a good completion rate of messages.