Usenet not P2P…

Why people should use Usenet not peer to peer… (or at least in addition)

P2P was great around the early days of Napster, WinMX  and the like, but no longer.

We had private BBS’s, Anon public FTP sites, and even websites would actually host content…wow, how things have changed… Anyway top few reason for getting on Usenet…

1) Speed – With a premium usenet account you can usually get your full downstream bandwidth, peer to peer is slooooow, broadly speaking, due to its distributed nature and the fact a lot of people have crappy upstream rates. For example I get constant 200k/sec on my 2Mb cable connection from my news server/s.

2) Retention – you can generally find things on (premium) usenet servers – for example old rare duocuments, videos, programs, the eclectic and arcane et cetera which do not surface in P2P circles as they tend to be quite contemporary.

3) Security/transparency – you  have far more control with a usenet connection to a single usnet server, rather than making hundreds perhaps thousands of arbitrary connections all over the world to who knows who…there is no lack of honeypots out there. Not to mention the overhead of having so many simultaneous connections.

For a good example check out www.eurofeeds.com and their prices. There are many others out their, find one close to you which carries a high (70,000+) volume of groups and has good retention.