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."

Comments

Re:Allow me to translate.

[houstonbofh]

"We believe the group of customers that use this service is small enough to not be able to start a revolt, and large enough that we'll see some profit from charging extra. We would do this to the 'using Google' service if we thought we could get away with it. Please ignore how badly this conflicts with our claims that Net Neutrality would destroy the internet, and that we're a self-policing market who wouldn't dare charge people more for certain types or destinations of traffic."

Nicely said!

Re:Who cares?

[GreatBunzinni]

You don't quite get it. Let me explain. Let's take slashdot's example. It's a commercial blog which employs a fair share of people and actively works to start new discussions, usually in an inflamatory way, in order to incite people to reply and read the discussions. Although it's "news for nerds", it tends to have a broad, mainstream editorial line. And what do we get from that? Discussions which manage to generate an average around 100 posts.

Now, look into the usenet's traffic. Those newsgroups I've pointed out generate a considerable amount of posts (some with an average of 100 new posts a day) although their topic is extremelly technical and very specific, topicality is enforced and valued and there is no team of editors enticing people to post. And that's the stats regarding a single specific newsgroup. There are countless usenet newsgroups dedicated to linux, of which a fair share do carry a considerable volume.

So, as you can see, that baseless comment on usenet's post volume is not only baseless but also badly thought out.