Astraweb
 

Hey all,

New to the boards, Anybody on VM use Astraweb for newsgroups, Used them on and off for years but been getting very erratic speeds since xmas. This service used to max out my 20mb constantly but now it can flucuate anywhere between 1mb to 19mb. Seems bad during the day, Almost as if i am being traffic shaped straight away, I know you can get traffic shaped if you shift 6gb data and it takes you down to 5mb but this is really erratic.

All the best
Rich

Re: Astraweb
 

Hi Rich, i've been using newsgroups for years, and Astraweb for about 4 years, i had enough of the erratic speeds from them the last couple of months and i'm on 50mb b/b, i now use giganews, costs more but always maxes out my connection

Re: Astraweb
 

ive had poor speeds with older files and a hell of a lot of their older (200 day plus) files are busted up quite a bit

Mind you its still cheap and I would still recommend them

Re: Astraweb
 

Ive been getting erratic speeds with them, some days ive hardly been able to get 1mb, think it must be a problem server side though as most of the time i can max out my 20mb connection.
They are cheap and i can cope with it being down for the odd day or so.

Re: Astraweb
 

Thanks for the reply peeps, im beginning to think its Astraweb, They normally do max out my 20mb connection usually with 20 concurrent connections and max speed is generally 2300kbps.

Re: Astraweb
 

I see supernews are doing a similar price as Astra - 99c more.

I agree with zing regarding files 200+ days old. A right old mess trying to leech them.

Re: Astraweb
 

im going to test a new provider this evening to see if it is astraweb or VM.

Re: Astraweb
 

Never had a problem with Atraweb even for 300+day files.. well worth the $11 a month

Re: Astraweb
 

Astraweb have been fubar'd for me for a couple of days now. I've tried all their servers and SSL. Time out's and incomplete files, I can just about get a connection at the moment. Anything from 15k to 300k on a 10mb line. Something's obviously not right their end.

:edit:In fact SSL won't even connect at all now.

Re: Astraweb
 

It was fine for me last night and this afternoon. I think all this talk of "deep packet inspection" that VM are implementing may be the culprit.

Re: Astraweb
 

Crikey. That sounds ominous.

Re: Astraweb
 

That was talked about on the newsbin forums, I thought though it was mentioned that the data aquired was from an optical tap and hence couldn't interfere with the original data at all

Re: Astraweb
 

No problems here on SSL and getting a steady 20mbit.

Re: Astraweb
 

They haven't implemented any traffic shaping measures.

Re: Astraweb
 

Just got a couple of old linux ISO's off it (250days old) never missed a beat