Usenet traffic has increased from 5 Terabytes per day in January 2009 to almost 9 Terabytes of traffic per day two years later. The statistics have been collected by Giganews, one of the world’s largest Usenet providers.
Especially the last six month have seen an incredible growth by almost 50% in daily traffic. This increase in traffic, along with the increased retention of data, has made huge investments into new hardware necessary. It is not only the networking infrastructure that required new hardware but also the storage infrastructure to store the additional data that is getting uploaded to the Usenet every day.
Giganews for instance offered a binary data retention of 240 days two years ago, and of 100 days in February 2007. Today the company announced a retention of 900 days which is more than three times the original retention. The actual investments in new hardware needed to go beyond that figure to accommodate the daily traffic increase.
Want to find out more about the Usenet? Check out our guides Newsgroups, the ultimate P2P alternative, List of Usenet Indexing Websites and The best Usenet Search Engines.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of the Usenet?
Pro:
- Full bandwidth utilization
- Binary retention is longer than on comparable services, e.g. file hosting
- No P2P, which means no direct connections to other users of the service
- SSL encryption standard
Cons:
- A software is required, see Newsbin (commercial), Mimo (free for Giganews customers) for example.
- Accounts usually cost a monthly fee unless the ISP / Organization offers free Usenet access.
Giganews is currently offering 14-day trials and adds 50% off of the first month of Diamond accounts to that for new customers. Diamond accounts get a VPN free of charge with their account which for instance can be used by people from outside the United States to access US-only services such as Pandora or Hulu.
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Usenet providers dramatically increase retention
Giganews Usenet Reaches 1200 Days Retention
Giganews has now 100 days of retention
Any speculation as to why it has grown so much in the past 6 months?
Now this is interesting. Only 9 terabytes?? I know I alone account for about 30 gigs per day. I’m actually 0.3% of the traffic? Hey, I’m a statistical blip!
Dante, they are only talking about upload, not download ;)
Darn! And here I thought I was a Somebody :(
You should increase your downloads per day to become somebody. A good start would be to mirror the Usenet day in day out ;)
14 days is not really state of art anymore. I think Giganews has like some more days now…
I was unable to find GigaNews’ original report. What I am trying to understand is whether the figure is refering to GigaNews’ own traffic or to total Usenet. The former would make sense with the all the major ISPs dropping Newsgroup support. If it means the latter, then despite this reference
http://www22.verizon.com/residentialhelp/fiosinternet/general+support/top+questions/questionsone/125159.htm?
being a couple years old, Verizon’s claim of “reduced demand for newsgroups…” would appear false!
Thank you for your terrific resource. I’m trying to get up to speed with a Real ‘Puter. “Back in the day” accessing newsgroups was no problem with the old WebTV.
Eh, unlikely (and fortunately) at this point anyone will see my retarded question anyway…