What’s the Best Usenet Provider for Australia?

Are you tired of downloading Torrents which are slow, contain malware, or can’t be bothered with the ever-increasing legal risks?

Our Usenet guide was written to show Aussies how to access movies, documentaries, and TV shows via a messaging system almost as old as the internet.

What is Usenet?

Usenet is a collection of Newsgroups or messaging boards used as the first internet forums.

News messages or posts get saved across a distributed server network, called Usenet.

Newsgroups included discussions about almost any topic on the internet, with files uploaded to the ‘binary’ section.

These binary groups contain Linux Distro’s, TV Series, Movies, and PS4 games.

Top Newsgroup Providers for Aussies

	TweakNews	GigaNews
Rating
	Team with USA Usenet provider to fill files	Premium Usenet provider. VyprVPN included
Location	EU	USA
Speed	100Mbit	Unlimited
Bandwidth	Unlimited	Unlimited
Retention	2500 Days	3000 Days
SSL	Yes	Yes
Block Accounts	Yes	No
Money Back	7 Day Trial	14 Day Trial
Connections	40	20
Price	€7.95 EUR mth	$19.99 USD mth

NewsgroupDirect

A Cost effective Usenet Provider that Performs Great!

Newsgroup Direct is my preferred Usenet provider for a few reasons.

The download speeds are terrific. Here’s a screenshot of the throughput downloading via a 100mb NBN cable connection in Australia:

NGD retention times are a perfect mix between reasonable price, but still having all files available.

Keep an eye on their site for Terabyte Tuesday deals, which seem to occur every few months. Terabyte Tuesday deals include 2TB of downloads for under $100USD.

Tweak News

Netherlands based provider that’s perfect for finding difficult to access content

What makes a Top Usenet Provider?

Retention – The number of days a file will be available on the Usenet servers. Providers need to balance the amount of hard drive capacity with by deleting old content to free space for new uploads. Premium providers obviously have greater disk capacity so retain binary files for longer.

Download speed – Premium providers host their servers in high capacity data centers. Another case was you get what you pay for with Usenet

Maximum connections – This is an essential consideration for anyone using Newsgroups, but especially Australians. Most Usenet servers reside in the USA or Europe. The geographical distance between your device and Usenet server causes high latency.

So each ‘connection’ is slower than if you could access a server based in Australia. Usenet protocol NNTP helps avoid this problem by allowing multiple simultaneous streams, for example 40x 2Mb which can reach  80Mbp/s throughput.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_News_Transfer_Protocol

https://www.switch.ch/network/tools/tcp_throughput/

SSL – Makes snooping on what you’re downloading more difficult. Although you should always assume ASIO, NSA and GCHQ can see what you’re doing if they want too.

What are the Advantages of Usenet?

The primary advantage of Usenet for downloading is leveraging the massive storage capacity and high bandwidth internet links.

Downloading Torrents gets limited by internet connections and location of the person(s) you’re downloading a file.

Usenet files achieve significantly higher bandwidth by hosted on redundant servers with 10Gig internet connections.

Pros

What are the Challenges with Usenet?

In recent years copyright holders have started issuing DMCA takedown notices to Usenet companies. Usenet hosts, especially in the US remove the offending files very quickly. The preferred Usenet setup uses 2 or 3 providers. By purchasing a premium US provider account, and using a European Usenet provider as the backup for accessing deleted files.

Here’s a screenshot showing how to set up multiple Usenet servers in Sabnzbs:

How Do I Find Content in Newsgroups?

Newsgroup boards exist for thousands of topics, so finding what you’re looking for can be difficult. Newsgroup indexers help find files. The search every News board, just like an Internet search engine like Google. So all you need to do is enter what you’re looking for, and the indexer will display a link to the Newgroups that contains the file.

Binsearch.info is one of the best free indexing tools.  The downside of free-to-use sites is they’re slower to find content and take longer to flush deleted files from its database. Paid, or invite only index sites are better at finding the latest data and displaying less ‘deleted files.’

Which Software Do I need for Downloading Files?

Once you’ve found content the next step is to set up a newsgroup reader, which helps download files.

Newgroups have a 15MB file limit, so readers utilize Winrar or Tar compression software for joining files and extraction.

My recommendation for the best Newsreader software is Sabnzbs. It’s opensource and free, with integrations into 3^rd party tools such as:

All these Newsgroup software are great for building a library of your favorites Movies and TV Shows for Sabnzbs to automatically download when new content is released.

I’ve been using Sabnzbs for almost ten years; it’s so customizable that it practically sits in the corner and you’ll never need to touch it.

Conclusion

There you have it. Usenet can be cheap, fast, and provide as much content as you could ever want.

If you’re still not sure, sign-up with Tweaknews for a trial account, setup Sabnzbs and try Newsgroups. I’d be surprised if Usenet didn’t become a part of your Tech ecosystem.

Enjoy watching or listening to your favourite content!