Giganews Usenet Review

Giganews Usenet has long been at the cutting edge of the Tier-1 NNTP service providers.

Custom server software provides fast, redundant, distributed access to newsgroups.
NNTP servers in USA, Europe and Asia
days binary retention - the longest retention for any Tier-1 provider I know of
Very fast download speeds
- I get over 8Mbps download speed from European servers
- I get over 21Mbps download speed from US servers
- Test your connection speed
14-day free usenet trial

A little more detail on the speed of the connection I get from Giganews Usenet; I am located in Independence, MO just outside Kansas City, I have a Comcast business class connection and I used the Newsgroup Download Speed Test on the link I gave above.
Looking at my search page you can see that I get comparable active file transfer speed from Giganews Usenet as I get from "MY SERVER" which is literally sitting 6-inches away on a GigE connection. I hope this is just because of the old 486 machine that I am running news on, and the large number of peers it connects to, and not a reflection of my networks actual performance. Either way, the connection speed from Giganews Usenet is impressive.

Giganews Usenet has consistently added new services and features, many that are available to all users and some which come free to Diamond account members. Features added in just the past few years include:

VyprVPN - a secure, encrypted internet connection that protects your privacy. VyprVPN is free to Diamond account users, or available for separate purchase from the developer, GoldenFrog. Versions are available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone/iPad/iTouch and Android operating systems.
Giganews Accelerator - provides header compression for improved download speeds and 256-bit SSL encryption for all accounts.
This provides what I call "poor man's privacy" for your account, ie. encryption prevents your ISP from seeing what groups you are downloading from, etc. However, it is still possible for your ISP to know what sites and/or what services (HTTP/S, NNTP/S, etc) you are using from those sites, which they can use for various things including throttling your connection speeds.
MIMO Browser - a full usenet browser with built-in support for RAR and PAR files, threaded message reading and image viewing. It also has an integrated search feature, built-in Giganews Accelerator and has been optimized to deal with Giganews' large retention time and article count. MIMO is included free with all accounts, unlike most other usenet browsers on the market, this one is still under active development by Giganews and GoldenFrog.

Unlimited Plans
Days Retention
256-bit SSL
Diamond Plan
$21.99 per month
$10.99 per month for the first month
50 connections
VyprVPN Pro
Platinum Plan
$19.99 per month
20 connections
VyprVPN Personal