Anyone using IS newsgroups?

Yep, they're great!

Speed after hours saturates my connection; during office hours it's a bit slow (although it was better today for some reason).

The retention is better than most international pay-services, and seems to be about 69 days!

So far I haven't tried to download anything that wasn't available on the IS news server (and I download a LOT).

It does have some problems every now and then, but it's usually fixed pretty quickly.
 
BishopZA said:
Yep, they're great!

Speed after hours saturates my connection; during office hours it's a bit slow (although it was better today for some reason).

The retention is better than most international pay-services, and seems to be about 69 days!

So far I haven't tried to download anything that wasn't available on the IS news server (and I download a LOT).

It does have some problems every now and then, but it's usually fixed pretty quickly.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info. It sounds pretty good. What newsreader are you using ?
 
I use the newsgroups too, they are pretty amazing. I purchased newsleecher for myself and it works like a charm
 
tucows.co.za .But I am not sure if that is local anymore
 
I've been trying out Telkoms newsgroups, what a load of **** (unless I'm doing something wrong). IS will have to be about 1000 times better to make it worthwile getting an IS account.
 
Nick333 said:
I've been trying out Telkoms newsgroups, what a load of **** (unless I'm doing something wrong). IS will have to be about 1000 times better to make it worthwile getting an IS account.
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SAIX news group is a piece of cr@p - as one would expect.
IS news group is worth the IS subs just by itself - on a 384 line I get 50kB speeds from 5pm until around 7am = +-3GB per day. Not too bad...
(Day time it hovers between 6kB and 20kB)
 
Moederloos said:
IS news group is worth the IS subs just by itself - on a 384 line I get 50kB speeds from 5pm until around 7am = +-3GB per day. Not too bad... (Day time it hovers between 6kB and 20kB)
Click to expand...

Moederloos - who are you getting your access through? IS directly?
 
Nick333 said:
I've been trying out Telkoms newsgroups, what a load of **** (unless I'm doing something wrong). IS will have to be about 1000 times better to make it worthwile getting an IS account.
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If you think they're bad you should see uunets - :eek:

UUNet also shapes nntp hecticly. If uunet - sorry Verizon - wants to introduce a new adsl service they'd better up their game. The ONLY redeeming feature of a uunet/verizon account these days is that its uncapped.

Back to the topic :) - Whats the cheapest way to access the IS news servers and get a local 30gb cap? Openweb?
 
bwana v.7 said:
If you think they're bad you should see uunets - :eek:

UUNet also shapes nntp hecticly. If uunet - sorry Verizon - wants to introduce a new adsl service they'd better up their game. The ONLY redeeming feature of a uunet/verizon account these days is that its uncapped.

Back to the topic :) - Whats the cheapest way to access the IS news servers and get a local 30gb cap? Openweb?
Click to expand...

I dont know about others but I like openweb. I think you can get a 2gig international with 28gig local for R163, you can use the 2gig for a bit of p2p as its not shaped
 
Gothan said:
I dont know about others but I like openweb. I think you can get a 2gig international with 28gig local for R163, you can use the 2gig for a bit of p2p as its not shaped
Click to expand...
Might be worth it just for the news server if its as good as people say it it.
 
hi,
totally new with this news server stuff. looking at p2p where just about anything is available, how does IS news server compare content wise ?
 
Well I can say it is, if only for the completion of articles. Back when I had a saix account, most newsgroups on the saix server hardly ever has complete postings of multimedia that are spanned over a number of articles. There was usually a couple of the posts missing, but with the IS news server its 99% of the time complete. So when my IS international is crawling along, I just start downloading from the newsgroup. And being capped currently during the day my international is dead slow (without the proxy), then I surf those newsgroups....whole 23 gigs of downloading a month
 
99% completion is perfectly good - just make sure there are PAR files before you begin - I tend to download 5-20 blocks of PAR files first - If I get those, then 99.9% of all downloads work. One download needed arounf 60 blocks to repair - but the post was almost 60 days old! Even GigaNews rarely has complete posts around this age group.

(
for those needing technical FAQs, try
http://slyck.com/ng.php?page=6
)
 
Thanks for the pointer to slyck.com moederloos, it got me pointed in the right direction!

Now a question for all your newsgroup boffs: I've got a mega-connection to IS through where I work, where international speeds of 400kb/sec on occassion are not unheard of (probably pulling directly from IS's cache), but I can't get more than 8kb/sec when pulling from news.is.co.za!

Any ideas? Something I could check from my side? I'm not sure if there could be a firewall-related cap? (But I doubt it)

Thanks in advance!
 
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