Usenet Perception & Reality
NewsAdmin Staff Writer

My job places me behind a computer for the better part of the day, and as a result I'm not as active as I may have been in high school or college. During my lunch break I'll climb a short staircase that leads to a Burger King, or bend down to retrieve a Snickers bar from a vending machine, but I haven't convinced my wife that this qualifies as exercise. In an effort to help me shed the 10 extra pounds that I've been carrying around... alright, maybe it's closer to 20... she asked me to forgo my fast food lunch, and stop home for a home cooked meal.

To my surprise when I arrived I found a large, juicy, grilled hamburger patty, cheese, tomato, pickles & lettuce nestled between a sesame seed bun. My salivary glands kicked into overdrive before I even sat down, and I wondered if this was the nutritional meal she had spoke of, or if it was part of a twisted plan to test my willpower. My wife explained that the savory burger in front of me was indeed a healthy alternative to the junk food I had inhaling, and she invited me to sit down and dig in.

Mulling over the first bite, I realized that there was something horribly wrong with the tastes and textures assaulting my mouth. The appetizing burger that I had lusted for just a moment ago, was actually a Boca burger... a nutritional blend of soy, veggies and special seasonings... all of which tastes about as good as a wet baseball mitt. As I frantically searched for a napkin to deposit the blob that was forming in my mouth, I was reminded once again that perception and reality are often two different things.

Usenet providers will often play with perception and reality to support their claims of being the "biggest" and the "best", or to justify their expensive membership fees. When selecting a provider it's important to cut through the marketing spin to understand what your membership buys you, and if that extra expense is warranted.

It's not uncommon to find Usenet providers jousting over who has the biggest newsgroup list. The number is featured prominently within home page promotions, and seems to change on a weekly basis... 60,000 groups! 90,000 groups! 150,000 groups! A popular perception is that the best providers offer the biggest list of newsgroups, but reality says otherwise. In our experience there are approximately 30,000 to 40,000 active newsgroups that exchange useful content, and anything after that becomes a Usenet crap shoot. What do we mean by that? Well if you take a look at the extra groups that some of these providers offer, you'll find that many of them are fake, inactive, or collecting points for spam... none of which would compel us run out and pay higher membership fees. The reality is that most providers offer the same list of popular newsgroups, they pickup new newsgroups as they're created within the Usenet community, and most providers are willing to add active groups that they may have missed along the way.

Usenet providers also wage a war of numbers when it comes to retention, which is a term that refers to how many weeks, months or years they keep content available within their newsgroups. Not long ago, premium providers offered 30 days retention within their binary newsgroups, but that number has quickly climbed to 100 - 200+ days. Generally speaking if you frequently visit the newsgroups, maintain a broadband connection, and your Usenet account offers a reasonable download quota, 100 days retention will give the typical Usenet user enough time to retrieve content of interest. For an older post that falls outside the 100 day window, a simple "repost" request will usually put you in contact with the content you require. There are providers promoting 200+ days retention but if you download newsgroup content within 100 days window, you may find the extra retention and membership costs unnecessary. It's also important to verify that those providers are offering 200+ days retention within all of their newsgroups. In our experience we've found that the number represents an average, and the actual retention within high traffic binary newsgroups can be substantially less.

We've also noticed a trend with providers offering server farms in different geographical locations, and promoting this arrangement as a performance advantage over competing Usenet providers. As an example a provider may offer server locations in California, Virginia and Europe, and the perception is that end-users will enjoy better performance by accessing servers that are located closer to their Internet connection. This is actually a concept that Usenet providers utilized during the early 90's when the commercialized Internet was still working through growing pains relative to how backbones and networks exchanged traffic with one another.

Nowadays, if a Usenet provider is willing to invest in a relationship with a quality backbone partner, they can locate their servers at a single location and facilitate quality connections for domestic and international users. Alternately, if a Usenet provider chooses to partner with an inexpensive backbone they may be forced to locate servers in different geographic locations to compensate for their provider's limited network. Aside from the inconvenience of having to connect to different servers and addresses, this arrangement can also result in confusing tiered memberships that require end-users to pay for the number of servers they wish to access. In respect to functionally, this setup can also contribute to posts being delayed or incomplete as a Usenet provider attempts to share content between their various server sites.

It's also important to have a Usenet provider define their meaning of the words "unlimited" and "uncensored". Unlimited is often used to described a newsgroup account that offers unlimited download capacity, and the cost of these memberships can vary considerably from one provider to the next. In our experience, many of the low cost providers attach speed restrictions or "excessive use" data caps, so at the end of the day they are not truly selling an unlimited account. Some providers also promote themselves as an uncensored newsgroup service, but in many cases this simply means that they allow both valid and spam content to populate their newsgroups, so they're not really offering legitimate content that you couldn't get elsewhere.

Everyone ultimately has different uses for the newsgroups, so rather than shop around for a perception of what a quality Usenet provider should be, you may have more success by selecting a provider that will do the best job of meeting your personal requirements.

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