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Cox Discontinues Usenet, Starting In June
Existential Wombat was one of several readers to note that Cox Communcations customers have been put on notice that their Usenet access will soon dry up, unless they want to pay a monthly surcharge for it. From the note that subscribers received: "Effective June 30, 2010, Cox Communications will discontinue Usenet service to our subscribers. Declining newsgroup usage in recent years has highlighted the need to focus our resources on other priorities, such as increasing our Internet speeds and providing new services, including Cox Media Store and Share. We understand that our newsgroup subscribers may want to continue accessing Usenet. Therefore, we have worked with leading newsgroup service provider Giganews to offer special pricing for Cox subscribers."
Gripes Existential Wombat: "$15++ a month for something Cox provided as a part of the service? Of course they will be reducing everyone's monthly tariff by the value of the service they no longer provide. Yeah, right."
The standard discussion forums for a great many tech communities are still on Usenet: comp.lang.python, comp.text.tex and gnu.emacs.gnus are just a few that I read daily. While you are right that the average subscriber doesn't know about Usenet these days, the Slashdot crowd ought to be upset that ISPs are dropping Usenet servers.
www.eternal-september.org
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
"The "newsgroup" service that Usenet was designed for is now superseded by Google Groups (who absorbed DejaNews, the site that aimed to archive every Usenet post ever), zillions of web forums, blogs, comment friendly sites like, um, the one you're reading this on called Slashdot... get the point?"
Compared to my Usenet client, Google Groups, Slashdot, and every other web based system are a collective joke...and I am sure there are better Usenet clients than what I use (KNode). Usenet also has the advantage of being distributed -- or did Slashdot suddenly start exchanging comments with other systems (can I peer with Slashdot?), which came in handy when a Usenet server I used to use was shut down; I just pointed my client to another server, and the same discussions were all immediately available.
Really, when it comes to text based discussions, Usenet has a lot of advantages. If all you care about is using the latest cool looking technology, I guess that does not matter to you, but some of us actually do like the discussions on Usenet. There are still a number of very nice discussions on technical topics, such as cryptography, math, and various programming languages. Usenet is not just for "illegal content," even if that is all you ever used it for.
As for better service...well, let's put it this way: when Time Warner stopped running its Usenet servers, there was no increase in the quality of service I received from them. The quality of service remained identical, as it has with other ISPs. Cox just wants to turn a higher profit by ending a service that a minority of customers were using, and to claim otherwise is either naivety or outright lying.
Palm trees and 8
The $15/month is _not_ what you'll be paying.
The real price is $30/month. It's a crazy price. It's Giganews' "Diamond" plan that has no quota and has vpn. This is the one you want if you have a peg leg, hook prosthetic, eye patch, single gold hoop earring, and a parrot on your shoulder. If you buy this, you have more money than sense.
If you use usenet as originally intended, i.e. text only, the Giganews' price is $3/month. But then there are free nntp servers that carry only text groups anyway.
Highwinds (Cox's usenet) has always sucked anyway. It was always slow and cantankerous.
For those of you saying "hurr, use google groups": shut up. The interface is made of dead babies and week old roadkill. Decades old slrn is better.
--
BMO
...for a community that loves to bash companies about "buggy whips" and "adapt or die", we sure do love to hold onto our outdated, largely useless tech ourselves, don't we?
Translation of the previous sentence for the benefit of Moderators: "Please mod this comment down to the 13th level of Hell"
DSL is just as fast as cable, at least the way that residential providers do it.
I mean, sure, technically speaking a DOCSIS HFC network has higher last-mile capacity than an equivalent DSLAM, but when have either cable or DSL speeds ever depended on anything other than the provider's oversubscription ratio?
And as for television... Every internet connection comes with TV now.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
For those of us who use only text, paying for usenet is incredibly cheap. When my ISP quit offering usenet, I paid some piddling amount of money to astraweb.com and got 25 Gb worth of usenet access. Two years later, I've only used some miniscule fraction of that 25 Gb. Actually, I'm happier now than I was before. Back when my ISP was still supposed to be providing usenet access, it was unreliable, and when I would call their tech support, I would invariably get somebody who didn't know what usenet was. I got one guy who kept saying that I would have to call the Usenet Company and take it up with them.
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