Giganews are running trial offers right now that reduce the price of their two most popular Usenet accounts by 50% for the first three months. That means that you can get their most popular account (the one that I’m using btw.) for $14.99 instead of $29.99. The account will get you unlimited bandwidth, 256-bit SSL encryption and 20 connections to their services which usually means full speed downloads even for fast Internet connections. I cap at 1.8 Megabytes per second with my 16 Mbit connection and 10 connections to Giganews.

Users who want to test the Usenet account do need a Usenet client as well to be able to connect to the Usenet servers. There are a few free clients available like Alt.Binz. That’s all that is needed to get everyone started with Usenet. Some additional tips include using the Giganews Accelerator to speed up header retrieval from Giganews servers and to take a look at the Usenet Search article to access some of the best search engines available to find the files that you are looking for.

The Giganews accounts come all with a 14-day free trial period for extra safety. You will not be charged if you quit in that period and followed the rules outlined on the Giganews pages.

Here is the list of steps again:

• Visit the Giganews website and signup for an account.
• Download Alt.Binz or another Usenet client.
• Download Giganews Accelerator to speed up header retrieval
• Use Usenet search engines to find the files that you are looking for.

I think that the offer is a fair one especially for new users who never accessed Usenet in their life. Keep in mind that the monthly price changes to the usual after the first three months though.

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Alt.Binz is a free Usenet client that supports several of the most important features a news client should have. These features are multiple connections and SSL and NZB Support. Let me explain why I think that those three are essential. Multiple connections is a no brainer, Giganews (the best Usenet Provider) provides access to ten connections to their servers and a client should support that to maximize the speed from the server.

SSL is important for security. You don’t want your ISP or someone else snooping on your traffic finding out what you are downloading, right ? And NZBs are a a standard that makes it a lot easier to download from the Usenet. NZB files contain information about multiple files and their location on the Usenet. Instead of clicking on hundreds of files to download them you can simply load one NZB.

Alt.Binz looks like a great client. I had no troubles adding the Giganews server information to the client and support for the Giganews Accelerator was given as well.

The major difference is the approach. Newsbin provides direct access to Usenet groups while Alt.Binz does not, at least not in the way I have been using it for years. Alt.Binz has some Usenet search engines directly integrated into the program interface that provide access to NZBs. That’s a great feature and I hope the guys at Newsbin will implement it soon.

Supported are respected sites like Newzleech, Binsearch and several others. A full server wide search is supported as well. Now with Newsbin I usually visit the website of those search engines and download the NZB from those websites. This step is no longer required in Alt.Binz.

Alt.Binz is a great free Usenet client which I will definitely keep an eye on even though I have paid for Newsbin. The interface is intuitive and fast and it does provide access to several features that are definitely missing in Newsbin. Oh, and yes it seems to work under Wine in Linux.

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