AT&T clients

In Houston, Texas, usa, we are captive consumers. For me its either ATT DSL, Comcast cable, dialup, satellite, or cell.

Comcast did away with NG's a year ago, throttled back the bandwidth to 1 mbps, started charging $3 per month for cable modem rental, and upped the monthly price to $66 for 1 mbps. With cable you will have to share you bandwidth with your neighbor hood.

I now have ATT DSL for $35 for 5 mpbs. Five times the speed for

1/2 the cost of cable. I don't have cable tv. That does not include the required landline phone cost of $40 per month. They gave me a free wireless and 4 port wired modem / router. Plus $300 in rebates. My son tells me that ATT has dropped the landline requirement. I need to find that out. I am not happy with ATT getting rid of the ng's, but there is no alternative for an isp except dialup or satellite. Both are very slow.

Bandwidth - depending on me, son, and son's friend... If two of us are running Warcraft via ethernet and one more via the wireless, while streaming 128k web music at the same time, I barely notice any slowdown. That would bring comcast cable to a standstill. I estimate that with 3 comps using max everything, we use no more than

4 mbps. I am behind 2 routers w/firewalls along with each comp being firewalled.

My business associates use Verizon cell modems on their laptops. They work great but would never run Warcraft and can just barely stream 128k. Stay away from 3G. Its very choked at the moment.

Satellite has limitations and is prone to dropping. It is a last resort.

56k dial up would be better if available.

If you check the header source on this post you will see I am using

Its been reasonable ok so far. Sometimes it won't let me post for a fewseconds. I think their servers get choked up at times.

You can try searching here for open servers but admins are getting wiser and closing open ports.

Well, we can use Google's free access, but as others have said, the interface sucks.

"HLS" wrote in news:Tbu5m.16424$iz2.7859 @nlpi070.nbdc.sbc.com:

There's always Altopia. I pay $6 per month for non-binary. Completion and retention are pretty good. It's true Usenet, and you get to customize your own headers and Organization fields.

"HLS" wrote in news:Tbu5m.16424$ snipped-for-privacy@nlpi070.nbdc.sbc.com:

Use *real* usenet:

------------------------------------------------------------------ The following brief list of free text news servers is in alphabetical order without editorial comment. It's a short list. Check out the servers and decide for yourself which one is best for you. No one knows what works for you better than you do.

AIOE

Albasani

CNNTP ETT Motzarella Solani Tornevall Usenet4all (blocks all posts from Google) In addition, you can get superior service if you run your *own* server - such as Hamster and use multiple news feeds from the above and you won't have a problem with retention - mine goes back into last year - or one going down.

Unless you are into pirating a lot of music and movies or the like, very little. All day and evening surfing of text and limited binary newsgroups like alt.binaries.food adds up to less than 150 MB / Month, and yes that is MB, not GB. I've used 1.31 GB of news server bandwidth in 1 year.

Beyond the interface sucking, most of the good people you actually want to see your posts wouldn't because they block posts from Google.

I'm using usenetmonster for $3/mo and it's generally been fine. I've got more available GB than I'll ever use, so I could probably do better with a block account somewhere else, but for $3/mo the ambition to futz with anything else is low. The one time I had a problem with usenetmonster I got a response from support pretty quickly.

Super info.. Thanks

Super info.. Thanks

There are lots of them out there. Supernews is popular.

Hardly any, if they don't read the binaries groups. So little as to hardly be noticeable on a modern pipe. Usenet was designed in the days when 1200 baud modems were considered very fast.

--scott

(snip) That wasn't what he asked, actually. He was talking about Usenet bandwidth, ie how many gig a month of downloads do we all need to sign up for with Giganews or whoever. I'm going to start with their 5-dollar a month (or is it 6?) plan, and load the utility that monitors how much I have used until I have a better feel for it. I should probably cut back on the groups I follow anyway, since most of them are now just noise and spam.

If I didn't have my att.net address out there as my contact address so many places (more than I can remember), I'd just dump ATT entirely. (Currently paying 7 bucks a month for 'bring your own connectivity' account, just for news and e-mail. Now that news is gone, well, I have lots of other email accounts I can use.) ATT doesn't offer DSL in my neighborhood, or their fancy Uverse thing, so I get my DSL from another provider on a no-dial-tone second pair. Costs twice as much as ATT DSL would, so I hope they do expand to my neighborhood.

But yeah, I'm pissed too. Same price, less service, = price hike in my book. ATT crows about their new 'powered by Yahoo' home pages, and bells and whistles it has, but none of that crap is of any real use to me. I've been on usenet since green screens, all I want is connectivity.

Yea, I figured that out after reading the other posts. :) My network brain was thinking the usual definition for "bandwidth" and not data transfer totals. Bandwidth for usenet is negligible.

I feel the same. Have used ATT for several years, largely because they were the first and only DSL provider here. So I have vegetated over this period of time and have not kept up with the other options that might have popped up.

I get DSLinternet plus phone service including worldwide *almost free* long distance for about $100 per month.