For the last 6 years or so, I’ve been a Giganews user. Giganews is the largest Usenet provider in the world, and although they might be a bit pricier than other services, the premium is worth it because of Giganew’s outstanding retention and speeds.
However, recently I’d been unable to get more than a few Kbps, yes Kbps, at certain times of the days on my Virgin Media connection. My first suspicion was that Virgin Media have intensified their traffic management antics and I was correct. After a bit of research I learnt that Virgin Media is now throttling port 563 traffic, which is the port that Giganews uses for it encrypted traffic.
Luckily Giganews had already produced a solution for users like me who are getting capped by their ISPs, by supporting port 443 traffic. Port 443 is the port used by https traffic or 256 bit SSL encrypted traffic. Capping this port is much more problematic (and probably suicidal) for ISPs, and after switching to this port I’m now getting consistent download speeds of 48Mbps from my 50Mbps service.
If you are using a different Usenet service to Giganews and are suffering from speed issues, I recommend that you consider switching to Giganews. There’s even a 14-day Free trial to make the switch less painful.
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