Usenet Newsgroup Download Speed

Connection speed limits may be an issue for some newsserver customers who access servers outside their country. For example, customers in Asia may have problems connecting to servers in Europe and the United States due to latency on the connections. However, providers like Giganews and Supernews have servers in Hong Kong to serve Asian Usenet customers.

Some users also mention fast speeds when using the proprietary tools of Usenet vendors like Giganews and Newshosting.

Giganews offers their “Giganews Accelerator” to speed up the download of headers. This essentially compresses the headers and allows the user to download headers up to 10 times more than the normal download rates.

Newshosting offers “Lightning Accelerator.” This allows their customers to download headers off their servers at a faster rate. Their lightning accelerator is based off the STunnel Software.

Kudos to both companies for providing fast header downloads.

 


 Giganews Newsgroups

Usenet Download Speed


Download speeds offered by a Usenet provider are also one of the most important criteria when selecting a newsgroup service provider.

The download speed that a user is able to achieve is dependent on several things:
- The number of paths the Usenet provider has to the Internet.
- The connection speed of the user.
- The connectivity the ISP has out the internet backbone to reach your news servers
- Any speed limits or traffic shaping done by the ISP. This can be avoided by using SSL offered by your Usenet vendor.
- Location of the vendor’s news servers.

Some Usenet providers limit the speed of their users throughput by limiting the speed of the connections. They may only guarantee 500 kbps for each connection and offer only 20 connections giving the users a total download speed of 10 Mbps. This might be sufficient for some broadband connections but faster download speed packages are offered by ISPs as they improve their networks. It is always best to sign up for a provider who does not or who is not known to limit connection speeds.

You can test your download speed here.