- So you have a cable modem that supports 5 megabit
downloads. Unfortunately, there are a number of things that prevent
you from getting that full speed when connecting and downloading from a
newsgroup server.
- The internet is like a bunch of interconnected soda straws. The straw between your house and your ISP may be a big, fat, McDonalds size straw. But between
your ISP and the Usenet provider may be a series of 3 to 10 more interconnected straws, and each connection along the way slows things down, like
elbows in a water pipe. And if any of those straws along the way is too full, or is a tiny cocktail straw, data isn't going to get through very fast. Service providers are constantly re-routing traffic around these bottlenecks, but there is only so much they can compensate for.
- When looking at your total speed, the first thing
to consider is how long it takes to get out
of your own ISPs internal network. This is why downloads from your ISPs usenet
server will always seem faster than downloading from an external usenet
server provider. All
newsgroup servers outside your ISP will be affected equally by this
bottleneck.
- The second is any restrictions
the news group server company might put on the connection, whether
they be part of the service contract, or simple overloading of their
systems. Smaller usenet providers may still do this, but none of the big
4 or 5 providers do this any more.
- The third is that your ISP (company that you
connect to for Internet service) could be clocking or slowing down
(Throttling) the path on purpose. They do this by putting a limit
on "port" 119 because that is the port that is normally used for Usenet
connection. To get around this, check the support page of your
newsgroup provider company for alternate ports you can use. They
may also have special ports for certain ISP's with shorter routes, so it
pays to check out their support pages and make some settings changes in
your newsreader.
- There is one thing you CAN measure though,
and that is the total time it takes a message to move between your
computer and the usenet provider's servers. The way you do this is by
doing a "trace route" to the usenet providers server computer.
When you do a traceroute you will see not only the average number of
milliseconds it takes for the data to travel between you and the server,
but also the number of hops. The best performance comes
when the number of connections, or "hops" between you and the
server is least. Often this means that a person living in New York
will get much better service from a provider in Philadelphia, while the
person in San Diego is best served by a provider in Los Angeles.
- To do a trace route to a
usenet service provider, you must
first know the providers newsgroup server address. In general, the
name of the news server is news.domainname.com (or .net or whatever)
So the name of the easynews news server is news.easynews.com. Some
usenet providers have multiple news servers, such as news1.domain.com, news-east.domain.com,
etc. Check the SUPPORT or HELP pages of the provider where they often
list their news server names.
- We have located a very nice free traceroute tool
for Windows users. Simply download
VisualRoute Lite from Visualware, then install and run the program.
- In the "Trace To" box, enter the newsgroup server
address and hit Start.
- The program will build a graph of the different
routers you must pass through to get to the usenet provider's newsgroup
server. You will know it is
done when the 'XX% Done" near the top of the tab disappears. Since some
newsgroup service providers have multiple servers, you may want to try a traceroute against all of them. Sometimes they position different
servers in different places to provide a closer point of access for all
their customers.
- If you get a message that "Host could
not be found" it could mean that their server is off line. It
could also mean that your own connection to the Internet has a firewall
or other blocking mechanism. Or it could also mean that you simply
typed in the server name or IP address incorrectly. If you cannot
do a traceroute and you have typed in the server address properly, you
may not be able to use that newsgroup server, or even any other than
your ISP's. Do not sign up for a service until you are able to
successfully do a traceroute to their news server.
- What you are looking for is the shortest
time AND the least number of hops. A small number of hops means
there are fewer bottlenecks between you and the destination. The
overall speed is a factor of both the number of hops, the restriction
each hop introduces, and overall capacity of the pipes between the hops.
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