Nice bonus for Comcast Usenet users

[suffah]

Originally posted by: DefDC
Gotta love Usenet. It's been my friend since '92. Pretty much went straight from my Commodore 64 BBS's to the usenet when I went to college.. After Comcast dropped the free news I went with Agent Premium Newsgroups over at Forteinc.com. Unlimited downloads, 10 day retention for $14.99. Anybody know of a GOOD service with a better price? (Although I'm happy to pass my business over to Forte Inc. I've been a user of Agent since '94.)

I've been using newsgroups almost as long as you have, and used Agent exclusively for almost 7-8 years. Then I discovered Newsleecher and never looked back. I can finally load groups with millions of headers with no problems. Took me a month to get used to it but I can't imagine how I was able to use Agent for so long considering how much I download. Definitely check it out if you use the binary newsgroups.

As a plain text/message reader though, Newsleecher is sadly lacking.

 

[dascud]

For those with comcast you can actually download upto 10gig per month . Hopefully, posting this workaround is ok with AT mods.
Go to your comcast account and create upto 5 secondary email addresses. Login to your primary account and from account prefs designate one of the secondary email address as primary account. Voila you just got yourself another 2 gig/month . Cycle through the remaining secondary addresses and you got urself 10 gig/mnth for free. I have done this for 2 secondary email ids so far and it works fine. Havent tried all 5 but no reason why it shouldnt work.

Btw for linux users "pan" is one of the best newsreaders. Penguin power baby.

DaScud

 

[Starfox]

What is everyones speed using comcast's supplied giganews? I am getting 300-330k. Does this sound right?

 

[darksine2003]

Originally posted by: Starfox
What is everyones speed using comcast's supplied giganews? I am getting 300-330k. Does this sound right?

Yeah I get around there.

 

[SimMike2]

never mind

 

[middlehead]

Originally posted by: vailr
They should also reset the download count to zero, at the end of the monthly cycle.
At present, if you accidentally go over the limit, they start deducting for the next month's limit.

I'd just use 50 gigs, and get an outside subscription for the next 25 months

 

[CyberTron]

Originally posted by: ImpalaSS99
works for fills though

fills? on an ISP news server? lol.... fat chance

*edit* I take that back if its a giganews 2gb. they have rock solid 30 day retention.

 

[CyberTron]

giganews is only $24 a month. I cancelled my cable TV and download everything from there. If you need fills from a giganews server, it aint out there anymore I've had nothing but good luck with them. Also, I get 20Mbps(4MBps?) from a dedicated box I have at a data center... Still only get my 3mb/s from my DSL, but its nice to know if you have a university connection or whatever.

*edit* oh and thats for unlimited downloading. I do roughly 300GB a month with no problem.

 

[oRdchaos]

I can also vouch for astraweb. Prepaid plans never expire, and pretty cheap if you buy your bandwidth in the largest chunks they have. I also use Usenetmonster.com as my primary news server...depending on the months a 10gig plan might be enough bandwidth for me. Usenetmonster also has rollover, so having light months doesn't hurt any.

I have no problems constantly maxing my 2.5 megabit DSL constantly (using latest NewsBin Pro beta)

 

[gearedsteam]

Apparently Comcast limits the use of the newsgroup access to PCs that access the internet from a Comcast IP address... even if you are a paying Comcast internet access subscriber & use the correct Logon ID & Pwd.

Access from home with my Comcast IP address works fine... but when I'm away from home & on a dial-up line... I get a 506 error and something to the effect of "restricted to cc." in the text.

Does anyone know of away to get around this. If I only knew of a Comcast Proxy IP address that would allow non CC IP inboud... then I could probably proxy thru to my account.

Thanks in advance.

 

[EKKC]

ROFL @ 2GB.

i download 2GB in an hour with verizon dsl at work or earthlink-rr cable at home!!!

2GB!!! hahahaha!

 

[mohjong]

I used to use newshosting for a while, but their service goes down alot.
Now I use powerusenet http://www.powerusenet.com/
pretty much the same, so far the only problem I had is sometimes their authentication server might act weird and said I've reached my limit (4 allowed but I only use 2 connections at that time).

 

[ChunkyBarf]

For those of you with Road Runner, their servers are quite fast (400K+), included, and restriction-free. The only drawback is that the retention rate is seriously lacking on most newsgroups. If you check groups every day you will be very happy, it is when you check groups every week or so that you will be hurting. Just a heads-up for all the *.rr.com folks out there.

Viva la Usenet.

Later,
ChunkyBarf

 

[TrentSteel]

Retention is very good on Astraweb. I've been using them for a year or two now. They're also very reasonably priced.

Originally posted by: hansmuff
Yes, Astraweb is IDEAL for me because they offer pre-paid and headers don't count. Very fast, but I don't know their retention.

 

[straubs]

Originally posted by: ChunkyBarf
For those of you with Road Runner, their servers are quite fast (400K+), included, and restriction-free. The only drawback is that the retention rate is seriously lacking on most newsgroups. If you check groups every day you will be very happy, it is when you check groups every week or so that you will be hurting. Just a heads-up for all the *.rr.com folks out there.

Yep, routinely max out my cable line at 4.5 mBit. It's great! I think that time warner runs their own usenet mirror, so that you effectively get the full bandwidth since you never leave their network!

 

[EKKC]

Earthlink RR 6 MB! from both east and west servers

retention rate = 3-4 days

 

[BarbeQueGuy]

Giganews hasn't de-activated the old login I received when I first signed up. I use WinVN and just change ID and server info when I max out, been doing it for about 6 months or more.