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Sounds like they need to sort themselves out. I get TV about 3 hours after it has finished broadcasting. By using an RSS feed the shows download automatically. Check out the pricing at http://blocknews.net/ if you are interested in paying per GB (it goes as low as $0.09 per GB) if you want pay per month unlimited then http://supernews.com/ is cheapest at $9.99 per month. Both have around 400+ days retention.

May I add another 'No, it's not!' to the comments?

ISP-based usenet has always sucked. The retention was lowsy, the propogation was poor (if they even let you post) - or they simply outsourced to one of the Big 3 [giganews,usenetserver,eweka.nl] [http://top1000.org/#stats]

For those of us who know about it, Usenet is thriving - there's more data passing through it than ever. GN is adding 240days of binary retention (which is insane)

With the combination of NZB files [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NZB], and SSL, you'd be nuts to ever use a torrent again.
Speed + security + real files.

There are bunch of services:

Combined:
BitNabber.com [Combines NZB + SSL Usenet access]

Usenet only:
Giganews.com [240 days retention, SSL]
Supernews.com [Cleanest / most spam free usenet server]
UsenetServer.com [Solid service, SSL]

NZB Services:
http://www.newzleech.com/ [Free, but automatic, so results will vary]
http://www.binsearch.info/ [Free, also automatic, but with SSL]

NewzBin.com - [Premium + Invite only, but the goliath of NZB sites]

My ISP [Free, in France] provides usenet access, but constantly snips off groups according to its whims.

Since I use Usenet+NZBs, BitNabber works for me.

Others that might work for you:
Giganews.com - 200 days retention, from 7.99 p/m [SSL available] - no nzb service
SuperNews.com - from 3.95 p/m - the owner / admin Daniel is very hardline against spam, possibly the cleanest provider out there

Whilst it's frustrating that service should be cut, it seems that Verizon is behind the curve on cutting NG access anyhow.

Usenet is still thriving and there still many very active groups out there, some of which actually have comments in them as opposed to "erotica", although there's still plenty of that too, of course. Better yet, now that October is nearly here at last, the signal to noise ratio should go up too. Sure, many ISPs might be giving up their own Usenet servers, but if they don't outsource to a dedicated provider like SuperNews or Giganews, you can always get an account with them yourself. Failing that, you can hunt around for one of the numerous free servers, and there's always Google Groups of course, but they often don't carry as broad a selection of groups.

Crap! I meant to post that without any mods.
Also to be fair, http://http//www.giganews.com/ and http://www.supernews.com/ should have been added as well. Not to mention there are many list to open News Servers.http://http//www.newzbot.com/ and url:http://http://tinyurl.com/5uc4z/> Google Search

Many (most?) ISPs no longer operate their own NNTP servers. Far less bandwidth intensive and a helluva lot less hassle to subscribe to Usenet services like Supernews instead.

Next time you connect to your ISP's news server, do a traceroute. There's a good chance it's cnamed to corp.supernews.com or some other Usenet provider.

So, comparing the bandwidth requirements of operating a Jabber server (which would be open to people all over the Net to connect to, unless there's a way for the ISP to restrict accounts to only its subscribers) to "normal" ISP operations may be somewhat dubious.

I dont personally know of any UNSENET servers that have more than 10 days worth of posts.
Some of the groups (like alt.binaries.*) will only have 1-3 days retention.

You need a better news server. You're never gonna get a huge collection of whacking material from a news server like that. From Supernews:

alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica has 190466 articles, and 23.6 days of retention.

And non-pr0n:

comp.os.linux.misc has 34277 articles, and 281.5 days of retention.

This hasn't always been the case for Supernews; they recently upgraded storage. You can check retention for any group at Supernews.

Not a Supernews employee, just a customer.

You can buy news access from elsewhere, e.g. Supernews or use the free DFN-CIS server.

supernews. Basic Monthly is 6 gigs @ 13.95 upto 36 gigs a month at $59.95. I've never maxed out that 6 gigs, but I'm also not snarfing down passive amounts of porn. Cough cough.

Frankly I don't see why companies like supernews and other usenet providers aren't held accountable... ...why should they be allowed to carry groups like alt.binaries.kiddy-porn?

My ISP uses Supernews for our news service. A quick search shows that, even if there is such a group as "alt.binaries.kiddy-porn", they don't carry it. A slightly more in-depth search shows no overtly pornagraphic groups using the strings "kid" or "child". Don't believe me? Search for yourself.

Again, I don't know if these groups do exist elsewhere and are just not carried, but before you go slandering an honest company providing a valuable service, check your facts.

Being notoriously frugal...

You misspelled cheap. Get an account with a real ISP or buy NNTP access from someone like supernews. Nobody owes you free bandwidth.

Then get a better news server.

@home users can always use an alternate news server. The @home groups have a habit of not having good retention time anyway. Supernews is pretty good, from what I hear.

Cox outsources to Supernews for its Usenet service. Yes, it's pretty decent...retention in alt.binaries.sounds.mp3, for instance, currently has 64175 articles going back 2.3 days (I've seen it higher before, but alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 is one of the highest-volume newsgroups, if not the highest). Before I signed up for cable-modem service, I used Supernews with a cheap dial-up ISP to bypass their crappy news server.

I use Claranews. It's a good server with an annual fee.

You get what you pay for.

Supernews is pretty decent, too. It's a bit more expensive now than when I last subscribed to it (used to be $10/month), but my cable-modem service provider outsources Usenet to Supernews so it's part of what I pay for that.

I'd recommend outsourcing usenet. Usenet will eat up a *lot* of bandwidth and hard drive space. Let someone else handle it for you.

Your mileage may vary, but I would recommend a company like SuperNews, which hosts Usenet on their own high availability servers and simply charges you on a per connection basis. Start out with two simultaneous connections.

People on /. who are knowledgable tend to forget that for 98% of users the Internet consists of email and the World Wide Wait. Usenet usage for the local 2,500 user ISP is never more than ten concurrent connections.

I find the money an outsourcing company charges per month more than handles the hassle of maintenance, and if they are reputable (and you do not want to become a guru on the subject of usenet) the outsourcing company will supply much more thorough, more frequently-updated access than you could possibly provide.

Usenet will be around as long as people enjoy talking, debating, and/or fighting in mostly unmoderated ways...

If you take a look at this graphic, you'll find that the average daily feed for all of Usenet was 80 GB. Per day. Even the text-only discussion groups work out to 4 or so GB/day.

Just 'cause you haven't been there don't mean nobody else uses it.

James

Folks,

The current volume of a full Usenet feed these days is running 35-45GB/day (see http://newsfeed-east.supernews.com/fe ed-size/). Now, if you multiply this by Ninety, you get something on the order of about three terabytes -- not one.

The good folks at remarQ have a news server on the west cost with over 1TB of news articles online, and it has only about thirty days of retention (about what you would expect, given the volume).


So, they're either missing something in their spool, they have more than 1TB of spool, or there's something else funny going on.