Fungified Newsgroup Downloads
NewsAdmin Staff Writer

You'll only find the best newsgroup providers listed at our website, but it's important to note that those rankings are based upon our NewsAdmin staff reviewing over 80 Usenet services. The good, the bad, and the fugly.

During our cyber travels we've run across 2nd and 3rd tier providers who have channeled the spirit of PT Barnum when it comes to promoting the performance of their news servers. "Blazing download speeds", "Super blazing download speeds", "Super duper blazing download speeds"... well, you get the point. What these providers promise, and what they deliver, are often two different things. The download experience is more "Eye glazing" than "blazing", more "super snoozer" than "super duper".

There are several factors that can impact your connection performance to a news server, some of which are controlled by the Usenet provider, and others that are not. When the planets align and those factors are working in your favor, downloads are usually fast. If those factors are uncooperative, you may find your downloads growing fungus as they creep from a provider's news server to your hard drive. Here are a few things to keep in mind if your news server connections should go from fast to fungus.

You can have the fastest connection through your broadband ISP, but it will all be wasted on a Usenet provider that restricts connection speeds. While it's not the best analogy this situation is be similar to roadside construction. One minute your speeding down 4 lanes of open highway, the next minute a roadcrew has narrowed the highway to one lane bring traffic to a crawl and everyone's patience to a breaking point. Some providers acknowledge that they throttle connections, while others are less public with their admissions, so you should always use the free trial accounts offered by Usenet providers to determine your eventual download speeds. If a provider does not offer a trial we suggest that you make a quick exit and find another Usenet rest stop. Based upon our testing, NewsGuy and Usenetserver consistently provided the fastest download speeds, while some of our slowest download times were recorded at UseNeXt and NewsgroupDirect.

Between your computer and a Usenet provider's news servers sit a series of Internet points & backbones that transport your newsgroup downloads. These points are commonly referred to as an Internet route, and routes will vary considerably depending upon a person's geographic location and their choice of ISP. Similar to a kink in a garden hose, any one of the points on your route has the potential to degrade your connection performance in the form of excessive data loss, slow latency speeds, or an intentional restriction (speed cap, download cap, etc.) When evaluating Usenet providers it never hurts to ask their support people to run some diagnostic tests to your Internet route to see if they can spot potential disruptions that might hamper your connectivity to their news servers.

If your Internet provider is placing a speed cap on your newsgroup access, they will typically do this by monitoring the default port (119) that NNTP newsreaders use to communicate with news servers. This type of a restriction can often be bypassed by setting your newsreader to an alternate port number (8080, 80, etc.), so you'll want to shop around for a Usenet provider that offers different port options. In keeping with my confusing analogies, this would be similar to a speed trap being setup on a particular highway, and taking an alternate road to your destination to avoid the trap.

In some instances you may only need to look as far as the mirror... queue background music (Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror)... to find the source of your connection problems. Newsreader software comes in a variety of flavors, and some of them are more efficient than others when it comes to interacting with news servers. Our staff generally avoids readers that are bogged down with excessive bells & whistles because the additional overhead often results in slower processing speeds. Additionally you may also want to reconsider using an application that did not start its life as a newsreader. These apps have been "adapted" to work with the newsgroups, unfortunately the modifications are usually clumsy and designed by developers that are not familiar with Usenet.

Firewalls or Internet Security software can also wreck havoc on your Usenet connections. One stray setting can be the difference between a fast or disruptive connection to your favorite news server, and some firewall applications will automatically add access conditions without your approval. Generally speaking it's not a bad idea to periodically check your settings to make sure that they're not impeding your news server connections.

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