- Four things really matter when choosing a binary
newsgroup usenet server provider:
- What you need to know:
- Newsgroup Provider speed is now the second most
critical feature when evaluating a Usenet Provider. The 20mps
that many home connections provide is much larger than corporations used
to have only 2 years ago. A fast internet connection is no good
if your Usenet Provider's servers are slow or traffic is getting
bottle-necked before it gets to you.
- Speed is made up of both the speed of the provider's servers and of
the network backbones used.
- Speed can also be influenced by the number
of connections you are allowed to make (varies by plan with each
provider).
- Backbone network speed problems are a factor of how congested the
backbone provider is and how many hops (routers) occur between you and
the provider's servers. It is also possible for a provider to
overload one of their backbones if they do not buy a big enough
connection to a backbone provider
- Speed at the Usenet server farm is also important. Many second-tier
providers have over-loaded their equipment, so databases take longer
than they should to sift through headers and articles before sending
them to you. Especially with large binary groups like the
DVD groups, it can take forever to download headers if the usenet
provider's servers can't find and send data, regardless of the network
speed.
- Having multiple connections open at once (providers usually
allow from 3 to 20 connections at a time) MAY allow you to get more
throughput by sending different parts of a message or file over multiple
backbones. It is our experience that benefits of this approach
fall off after about 3 connections though.
- You can check the network
speed and number of hops by running a Tracert.
Many provider's support pages also provide an on-line reverse tracert
on their support pages. They may also list alternate backbone
routes from their servers (Covad may have fewer hops to your house
than UUnet). Giganews,
Newshosting,
and others allow you to choose which backbone is best for you by
using a different port when connecting to their server.
- In general, the Anchordudes' analysis of speed is based on servers
and header download speeds, as we feel most network problems are
transient and can be addressed by connecting through a different port
and backbone.
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