| Re: Attn: JimBoss, Isis, etc..Astraweb, Giganews - speed? |
Unlimited download news .. |
| Free Agent (freeagent@nospam.com) |
2009/09/01 08:16 |
On Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:03:05 +1200, Hubchy <ablank.field@nothing.com>
wrote:
>I am now just about ready to move to either Astraweb or Giganews.
>Now Astraweb's $11 a month unlimited deal looks very good and, as you
>have pointed out patiently and persistently their retention is
>extremely good.
>
>I'm wondering roughly what you find the respective download speeds of
>Astraweb and Giganews to be. I realise that my speeds are probably
>affected by different things than other people, but I've got my
>experience with Easynews as a good baseline for NNTP.
>
>Regards, Hubchy
There's no reason one can't post a bluray with Astraweb, should one
desire to do so. Other than one person I'm not aware of anyone else
who posts in article size chunks as large as 4MB. I MB or 1.25 MB is
plenty large considering most posters still use 256K chunks.
There are no overall download speed limits with either Astraweb or
Giganews that I'm aware of. I've used both. The difference is that
with Giganews one can get the fullbandwith (I'm using fiber with 20Mb
down 5Mb up) with only one connection. Astraweb limits the speed of
each connection so to get full speed with them I need to have about 5
connections down and 3 connections up to get my full bandwidth but
they permit 20 connections.
With Giganews I could get my full speed with one connection but they
limit you to only a few connects ( I believe). Giganews connection
limit can require judicious management if you're like me and you use
several different programs for Usenet at the same time switching
between them and you like to have more than one connection open on
each (for flexibility). With Astraweb's 20 connections it's less of a
problem.
Giganews also had a little annoyance in that when your isp assigns a
new ip # (whenever you reconnect or every few days or so) Giganews
locks you out for about 30 minutes-- you may not notice it because
you're software will just keep trying until Giganews lets you back in.
But Astraweb is probably a little flakier than Giganews overall with
glitches and problems. Both/all services have them from time to time.
Astraweb has gotten better but probably still has more problems than
giganews, ie they're down or you can't get certain articles or you get
posting errors ( I still will get posting errors on about 2 % of my
dvd posts where I've left PP going and come back later to find I have
to requeue certain files.
When Giganews had longer retention than Astraweb (when Astraweb was at
about 100 days), there seemed to be more of a justification for the
extra $ for Giganews, to my mind anyway. Now, unless Astraweb starts
having major problems or raises their rates, I'll stay with Astraweb.
Free Agent
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