The main reason is quality and experience. Usenet providers who offer bargain accounts might run into problems eventually that might lead to situations with to many users and to little resources so that the aforementioned connection and download problems appear again.

Giganews is the quality Usenet provider and I’m more than happy to pay for that quality. What I like is that you can cap your line day and night without problems no matter if it is a 16 Mbit connection or a 50 Mbit connection (if I would have access to 100 Mbit I would love to test their servers then as well). They provide a tool called Giganews Accelerator that uses compression to download newsgroup headers 6-10 times as fast. Everyone who ever downloaded more than a million pages from a group knows how long this can take without compression.

Giganews has now reached the milestone of 400 days of data retention. This means that they keep the data that gets uploaded to the Usenet for 400 days on their servers. This must be an unbelievable amount of data as upload traffic per day exceeds several Terabytes (Giganews mentioned it exceeds 5 Terabytes per day in February 2009) these days. 400 days of retention means that Giganews users can go back and search in those 400 days for data that they would like to download.

You guys know that I never advertise services on Ghacks unless I personally use and like them. Giganews is one of the few that I can recommend to anyone. They constantly improve their service and never let me down in the past.

Here is a short list of what you need to get started working with the Usenet:

• You need a Usenet Provider that is providing the access to the Usenet. I recommend Giganews but there are others out there as well.
• You need a software program to access the Usenet. I personally use the commercial Newsbin Pro client but there are free ones out there like Alt.Binz or Grabit.
• You need some good Usenet search engines. You can use these search engines to search for files that have been posted to the Usenet. Users who are interested in getting a Usenet account might want to use these search engines first to see what the Usenet has to offer.

And that’s it. There are lots of guides and tutorials out there that help Usenet newcomers. If you have any questions let me know and I try to answer them in the comments here.

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Currently about 5 Terabyte of data gets uploaded by users world wide to the Usenet, a figure that is surely about to increase as the popularity of Usenet services rise. Giganews is currently running so called Usenet trials which offer the first three months of Usenet access of some of their Usenet plans for half the usual price. Users can for example get an unmetered unlimited download plan for $12.49 or the premium Diamond plan with additional SSL encryption and 20 consecutive connections for $14.99.

What do you get for that? If you have never heard about Usenet or Newsgroups before you might be wary about joining a Usenet provider. That’s understandable. A good start is to take a look at our Usenet Search article which contains links to several Usenet Search Engines. They can be used just like any other search engine. Just enter a name in the search form and look at the results. Downloads are only possible with a Usenet account and a software client for Usenet. There are several choices, we outlined one in our Usenet Client article.

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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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Giganews also announced that they are currently running a special for AT&T customers. AT&T, much like Warner and Sprint / Verizon decided to discontinue the alt.binaries support for their customers and Giganews tries to offer them a new save home on the Internet.

AT&T customers will get the same deal that Warner / Verizon / Sprint customers got. They get up to 50% off of the first month of their subscription to Giganews. They can also signup for a free 3 day 10 Gigabyte download limit trial first.

If you want a tip I would definitely pick a Usenet plan that supports encryption to protect your privacy while being connected to the Usenet. Giganews users can also make use of the Giganews Accelerator which speeds up header downloads tremendously.

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Usenet Providers provide access to the Usenet which offers discussion based groups as well as groups that offer file downloads. What the Music Industry does not like at all are those groups where music files are posted. While this is understandable it is not the task of the Usenet Provider to filter content on the Usenet which would a nearly impossible task anyway.

This would be like asking Internet Providers to ban certain websites from being accessible by their clients. Ups, did not they do that already ? The real question is another one. Who is actually responsible if copyrighted files are getting uploaded ? Should not they press charges against the users who are uploading those files instead ?

This however is not that possible because of the way the Usenet works unless you would get access to the Usenet Provider’s data. Even then it is not possible to know which user uploaded a specific file unless he did use this specific Usenet provider to do so.

What is your opinion in the matter ? Should they be able to sue Usenet Providers ? Internet Service Providers ? The Internet ?

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This is one of the many features that have been introduced by Giganews such as 256-bit SSL encryption which makes it impossible for your Internet Provider to spy on the traffic that is send to and received from Giganews.

Another feature is the additional software Giganews Accelerator which compresses the headers that are received from Giganews increasing the header download speed by a factor of almost six. Giganews offers a three day trial with a 1 Gigabyte limit for everyone who is interested in trying out the service. If the service is canceled in that time you will not be charged at all, if you do not cancel you simply use the normal plan that you have selected during signup.

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A Usenet provider like Giganews gives you access to the Usenet which is basically a discussion platform where users can also post binaries. The binaries make the Usenet so attractive to everyone who feels that P2P is not safe anymore. Giganews offers SSL encryption which means that your Internet Service Provider does not know what you are exchanging with Giganews. If you want to get an impression of what the Usenet generally has to offer you might want to take a look at Newzbin and Binsearch. Those two sites are Usenet indexing sites that have records on many files that get posted day in day out on the Usenet.

Retention on the other hand is not everything. What good is a retention of 120 days if the files are all incomplete and useless to you ? Thankfully Giganews has a very high standard and offers more than 99% file completion which is a great figure for the Usenet. The speed is excellent as well, I can fully use my 16 Mbit connection and get 1.8 Megabytes per second using the encrypted connection to Giganews.

You do need a so called news reader software to be able to connect to the servers and download files to your computer. I’m using the commercial software Newsbin which is excellent. Grabit is a free alternative.

I have written a longer post in the past that gives you additional information, take a look why Giganews is the ultimate P2P Alternative.

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You probably do not know about the Usenet and wonder why you would have to pay for accessing it. I would like to direct you to the following two websites that could give you an impression of the kind of files (and discussion) that you find on the Usenet. Try Binsearch to discover the treasures of the Usenet. It is of course illegal to download copyrighted files like the latest movies, games and tv series – but no one would know if you would do which is different from P2P networks where you seed a lot and everyone is able to find out your IP.

You do need a program that connects to the usenet and supports SSL to be able to use this new feature. I use Newsbin which is a commercial software with many features but there are others that are completely free. Newsleecher is one for instance.

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