Giganews Usenet Provider review

Giganews is a long-standing trusted Usenet provider. What is meant by Usenet Provider is that it allows its customers to access the company's infrastructure to access the Usenet.

The Usenet can be best described to users who have never come in contact with it as a global forum with hundreds of thousands of groupsm and the ability for everyone to post and reply (provided that this is supported by the company that provides the access).

The messages that get posted and read are called articles or posts, and they are posted to so called newsgroups which are further divided into binary and textual groups.

Binary groups allow users to post files with their posts while textual groups do not. The main difference between forums and the Usenet is the decentralized system of the Usenet. There is no administrator or central server of the Usenet, everything is handled by independent servers that exchange data with each other.

Usenet access is provided by so called Usenet providers. Back in the days a lot of Internet Service Providers offered Usenet access but today there are only a few that do. Most stopped offering Usenet access due to the costs involved to operate or lease the infrastructure.

Public Usenet servers exist but they tend to come and go, and are not as reliable as they need to be to be a good alternative.

Giganews Usenet Provider

The only other choice to access the Usenet -- besides ISPs offering it, and public options -- are Usenet Service Providers like Giganews. Giganews is respected in the Usenet community for its quality service. The company is without the shadow of the doubt not the cheapest provider around, but it is without a doubt a premium provider.

When it comes to Usenet access, Internet users need to consider several factors when they select a provider. While the monthly subscription price is of importance, so are other factors.

• Traffic Limits: How many Gigabytes can be downloaded per month?
• Connection Limits: How many simultaneous connections are allowed?
• Encryption: Does the Usenet Provider offer encryption?
• Data Retention: For how long are the Usenet articles stored on the servers, or, the time period the archive that is provided dates back.
• Speed Limits: What's the average and maximum speed that users get?
• Completion: Are the files that are uploaded complete?
• Censorship: Are the newsgroups uncensored?
• Extra features: Are extra features, such as header compression, search, a web client offered?

Giganews, as a top provider, is offering some of the best - if not the best - values.

• Traffic Limits: Up to unlimited traffic.
• Connection Limits: Up to 50 simultaneous connections
• Encryption: 256 AES encryption offered
• Data Retention: Giganews offers more than six years of binary data retention and more than 8.5 years of text retention. Update: 2367 days at the time of writing this update.
• Speed Limits: 50 Mbit+ (this is the limit of our test connection to the Internet, it may very well be even faster than that). Giganews operates servers in the United States, Asia and Europe to provide users with faster access times to the servers.
• Completion: One of the best completion rates in the industry. Completion rate is greater than 99% (rest can be usually handled with so called parity files)
• Censorship: Giganews provides access to over 109,000 uncensored newsgroups.
• Extras: Some plans include VyprVPN accounts, all a Usenet browser, header compression.

Limited access plans start at $4.99 per month, the first unlimited plan is available for $19.99 and includes access to a personal virtual private network on top of that (VyprVPN Basic). There is also  14-day free trial that you may use to test the service before making a decision on whether to subscribe to a paid plan.

What you need:

The requirements that are needed to access the Usenet are one of the main reasons that it has not reached mainstream yet:

• Usenet Access: Access to a Usenet server is needed obviously. We recommend Giganews but there are other providers out there as well.
• Usenet Client: Several mail and chat programs offer access to the textual groups but the binary groups require a client that is able to handle those. One of those clients is Newsbin Pro which we have reviewed in last Christmas' Giveaway. It is a commercial software but there are free alternatives like Alt.Binz available as well

Giganews offers a client of its own that customers may use to access the Usenet. The program, called Mimo, is available for free for Giganews customers.

Usenet Preview:

If you do not know what you get then you'd probably do not want to pay for access to the Usenet. There are several options on how to get a preview. Option one is to make use of the free trial option that Giganews offers.

Another option is to use a Usenet search engine like Binsearch to search for files that are of interest.

Personal Experience:

I have been using the Usenet for more than ten years ,and was switching Usenet providers constantly back in the beginning because they did not offer what they advertised. That is, until I signed up for Giganews for the first time which I have been now for several years.

I never - and I really mean never - had connection, retention or speed problems other than the occasional ten minute period when your Internet Provider drops your Internet connection and you get a new IP.

The release of the Giganews Accelerator made my life a lot easier as it was now possible to download the compressed headers which bumped the speed to 4-10 times the value that uncompressed headers where delivered.

I know one thing and that is that I will stick with Giganews for as long as they continue to provide this excellent service.

Yes, the service is more expensive than comparable services. If price is your main consideration, then you better pick a budget Usenet provider such as Usenet Bucket.

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