Verizon Dumping Usenet Servers

Well, damn them to hell. That was a key ingredient for my moving from my earlier server system -- which I had kept up in parallel to verizon until almost two years ago and could have kept all this time, had I known then. I've dropped them, but I'll have a new conversation and see where that takes me. I also have a shared server site that may be able to replace this service, if I ask about it. (Or may already be able to, for all I know.)

I have ground line service and enough cell phones in service, as well as their DSL service, that the whole package costs enough where I'm likely to find a lot of desperate folks out there begging for the regular income I represent. Looks like it's shopping time, again.

Jon

Ask if they're going to reduce your fees ;-) ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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"Minimum wage" is why all our manufacturing is in Mexico and China

A much better indicator of your position would be to respond by "Dumping Verizon", and daring the bastards to attempt to charge or sue you for an unfulfilled contract obligation.

The counter suit would gain ground based on that blatant oversight alone.

They better keep offering what they originally sold, or they will have a huge class action suit against them that will be won by the class.

Good! Ten thousand less bots spamming usenet.

On a sunny day (Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:31:50 -0400) it happened "Martin Riddle" wrote in :

Outright lies. First they removed the binary groups, and now it was text based? There are thousands of newsgruops, and many have a lot of traffic.

My advice: Get rid of verizon or whatever it is, and let them know why.

'Verizon central newsrooom' what a stupid joke.

Welcome to the club. AT&T dumped it a couple of months ago. I subscribed to news.individual.net, 10 Euros per year. Fees to get those over there depend on your bank, usually around $20. I believe they let you pay for several years in advance so the fees will matter less.

Works well but as usual no binaries. Those will likely become dormant anyhow since an overzealous AG "convinced" providers to drop those.

More exciting? ROFL! To this day I haven't found a single service or network that comes close to Usenet. Not by a long shot.

[...]

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Easier said than done. In most areas of the US one (and only one) of the large telcos has a monopoly. Good old Missy Bell. Same in our neck of the woods. The only alternative would have been the cable TV company but they wanted outrageous fees unless I'd also subscribed to cable TV. And that ain't going to happen.

IIRC the one from AT&T is "Your world, delivered". What a joke that now is.

--
Regards, Joerg

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Yes, same here.

I'm in Oregon and up here not everyone is even served by cable, let alone fiber. If I look outside here, I see power being delivered on ye-olde-power-poles (not underground) and telephone lines piggybacked onto them. I do happen to be in an area where, say 10 years ago or so, coax cable was finally brought out. However, the owner of THIS house at the time decided not to "pony up" with the rest of the neighborhood and get cable. And so... we are the only home on this street without it.

I have asked them, twice since 2002, what it would cost to add cable service for access to the internet. The price ticket is a one-time charge of $3000. They have to run about 1500 feet of coax from the road to where my home is at (150' rise from the road, about a 1/4 mile back) and in this area there is 60" of rain a year so there are issues of moisture intrusion which make installation just a tad expensive. I'm sure that at about $2/ft laid-in, it's a bargain, but I haven't been interested in spending that kind of money just to get access to the internet (I don't watch broadcasts, ever.) I have better things to do with that kind of cash.

So... Verizon is out, soon. Cable is $3000 just to buy-in. And satellite? Out here in this forest system? (My land is heavily forested and looks like a northern, Canadian forest with 100' trees everywhere, rhododendrons, ferns of several varieties, and lots and lots of moss and lichens. Tricky at the best of times. I may need a tower just to get above it all. Laying the pad for that alone will lose me a few pounds, at least. ;)

Always can buy another service carried on the Verizon DSL back, of course. For now, that's probably the only cheap and easy solution until they eventually get around to digging trenches for fiber in this area sometime in the next decade, maybe.

I hadn't tried AT&T, but the Verizon support folks when we first started with their service (moved in, feb 2002) here were in California and very good to work with, quite knowledgeable, and helped me quickly get going. Some years later on, perhaps in 2006 or so, I had to call them because I was dropping my overlapped service from another provider that I'd kept active in parallel after moving here in

2002 and needed to switch over to their usenet service. The support was no longer in California and was instead in India. They didn't understand English and were completely struck stupid by questions about usenet -- something, I guess, most customers didn't ask them about. I had to ferret things out on my own, entirely. They were zero help and actually delayed me because I had to waste time trying to get them to actually understand simple sentences. Gave up on that before too long. If I dared to call their support now about usenet, I'm sure I'd get a complete 'blank-stare' over the phone. No comprehension, for sure.

They may be discontinuing the service out of their total inability to support it from India.

Jon

How does power and phone get to your house? If on poles, can't they just piggy-back on with coax?

Our house used to have cable with the previous owners. Comcast just slobbered the coax through the yard. It's still there, looks a bit faded but probably still works. Well, recently a doe shows up regularly so maybe she have trampled on it by now.

I had looked into other providers via AT&T lines. It wasn't cheaper.

Back when the AT&T server had a weird bug I called and landed at a help desk in the Philippines. Was "escalated" to a manager right away and she instantly began diagnosing the problem while I was on the phone. At some point she said "Oh, I see what the problem with the San Francisco server is, I believe I can fix that from here". Sure enough, 20 minutes later all the headers started roaring down the line, Usenet was back.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

...

Too true. Maybe Sir Richard will sense an opportunity and start a branch of Virgin Media over on this side of the pond. They're competing with BT for ADSL customers now, although not without a few bumps along the way:

--
Rich Webb     Norfolk, VA

Verizon is 'The Phone" company. (remember 'We know what were doing...' from SNL) Any other DSL provider has to go thru Verizon, they own the POTS network.

Verizon consumes 18.8% of the Usenet Bandwidth. It looks like around 12Gbytes/month is the total traffic on Usenet. So verizon is around 2G bytes or so. Not a lot of network resources being used. They don?t even actively manage the servers anymore.

There must be someother reason for them to dump usenet.

Cheers

On a sunny day (Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:55:38 -0400) it happened "Martin Riddle" wrote in :

12GB /month, for 10 cent per SMS of 1 kB... makes 12 000 000 x 10 cent = 1 200 000 $ , a million $. Better use the bandwidth for SMS ?

I already have cell service via Sir Richard. Now they offer broadband cell via 3G or so, but way too expensive because of the short expiration dates (their cell minutes don't expire). In this domain you can land better deals in Europe where even food discounters such as Aldi seem to offer portable Internet service plans.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Reduced demand? AFAIK usenet is one of the primary methods to share files that shouldn't be shared. I think the entertainment industry is behind this. Who owns Verizon?

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Very easily fixed by allowing only non-bonaries and limiting size. You can't get some big bootleg software across when the post limit is 100k. Also, I believe bootleg activity happens via "normal" web sites nowadays because kids don't have the foggiest what Usenet is.

I would not be surprised if 30-40 years from now when most of us will be in nursing homes Usenet is gone.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

On a sunny day (Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:47:54 -0700) it happened Joerg wrote in :

File transfer never was and likely never will be a problem. There is ftp, and, the 'kids' know very well what a 'port' and 'ethernet address' is. Therefore the music industry is doomed in any effort to stop transfers. Can you connect? Then you can transfer data. The most simple and beautiful of all programs related to that is 'netcat' in Unix.

The receiver simply starts this script, assuming, as example that port 1234 is reachable: PORT=1234 while [ 1 ] do echo "Hold ctrl C down to abort." netcat -l -p $PORT > myfile.something done exit 1

And the sender then does: cat bigfile.xx | netcat IP_OF_RECEIVER PORT_OF_RECEIVER

That will transfer the file. Period.

If they block some ports try port 80.... (http).

The world will change yes, but where is a need is a market, somebody will run a server.

Same for IRC, predicted dead over and over again.

The issue is likely one of control. The people in power do not _really_ want people to communicate with each other. They see the medium TV dying, they want something similar back to manipulate the masses, To keep the masses dumb, and have them repeat their mindless slogans like 'leftist weenies', without ever thinking for themselves, so they can be used as cannon feed in the next war. A war they do not even understand is solely for profit by the Bushists and other fascists. The multinationals, weapon manufacturers, creating tensions to sell more... And to make a hypocritic 'clean' internet while at the same time murdering millions for a buck more. And who owns those cooperations? The shareholders, basically you and me. And those want ever more profit. That seems to be, to me, and instable positive feedback loop, resulting in war after war after war, add to that other aspects of human nature, and you have what we have now. The pendulum will swing, until the species goes extinct. What comes after 'human' may well be mosquitos :-) hehe

Wish I could. We only have one telcom supplier here. Moving to some other provider will cost double to triple what I'm paying right now.

I went through the Verizon online help live chat today and asked about this. The service person swore that this was false and that usenet news was not going to be discontinued. I have not seen any announcements of changes to the user agreement like they did when they dumped the binaries, so for now I'm crossing my fingers. Tomorrow I may try to go through phone help but that usually takes way too much time out of a work day :-).

----- Regards, Carl Ijames

Thanks for going that far, today. The announcement sure is one of those that is believable, though. Besides, I did find this:

So if you do bother to go through phone help (located in India, last time I used it), keep that in front of you to hold their feet to the fire.

Jon