Come September 30, Verizon will completely drop Usenet access. (It had already been limiting access for some time now.) To that end, a number of Usenet providers, including Giganews and NewsDemon, have special deals set up for Verizon users to make the hurting stop.
First up, Giganews. Verizon users get 50 percent off the Diamond Plan for three months. (The regular price is $29.95 per month.) The Diamond Plan includes 50 simultaneous connections, unlimited monthly bandwidth, and SSL encryption. Or, if you don’t want Diamond, you can have any other Plan for three months at 20 percent off. There’s also a 14-day free trial for you to test the waters. All Plans come with 391 days of retention, which is plenty. Giganews is working toward 400 days of retention.
Next we have NewsDemon, which I use. It’s giving Verizon customers 20 percent off its service, which includes unlimited bandwidth and 20 connections. The top price for NewsDemon is $22.99 per month.
Then there’s always Astraweb, which is $15 per month for unlimited bandwidth, 20 connections, and no download rate limit. (The popular $10 per month service limits you to 1 Mbit/s.) I’ve never used Astraweb, so I can’t speak to it reliability. That said, I hear good things on various message boards.
So, plenty of options for Verizon folks. Happy trails.
I don’t want to look like an idiot here, but i’m not entirely sure what NewsDemon and Giganews are other than what appears to be some type of a news aggregate, that allows for bandwidth charges? I guess its time to do a google search.
I use Astraweb and I have to say the bandwidth is nice and retention seems to be as advertised. I was able to saturate my 15Mbit/s cable modem through astraweb. The retention rate is nice but even better is the completion ratios. I have yet to find anything going back about 1 year that was not able to find all the articles for.
There’s also NewsgroupDirect – $20/mo. for unlimited bandwidth, 20 connections and a free option if you want to try them out.
There’s also Ngroups.net, who sell access to exactly the same servers as newsdemon, but at half the price. (They have a special @ 29.99 a quarter for unlimited access.)
Hey Nicholas,
You missed the special offer Newsdemon started a few days ago adn you can actually get it cheaper than what you listed. $10.95 for Unlimited Access, 20 Connections. It was posted here: http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/08/24/crunchdeals-unlimited-usenet-for-1095/
Also the Astraweb unlimited bandwidth account is being offered for $11 a month. Link to special – http://www.news.astraweb.com/specials/kleverig-11.html
Usenetserver is also offering a Verizon special. UNS High-Speed Plus plan for $10/month. https://accounts.usenetserver.com/verizonspecial
As a follow up to my last post, the $10/mo Usenetserver special is available to all new subscribers here: https://accounts.usenetserver.com/special/