Thinking of getting Virgin Media

I was thinking of getting 50MB Virgin Media and I have a few questions.
1) Is it throttled? Are Usenets throttled?
2) Does it have free Usenet access?

Yes, usenet is throttled and quite severely in the evenings. I get about 700 KB/s on 50 Mb, which is not that bad really! (If you're in a real hurry you can work around it and get full 50 Mb goodness by using SSL on port 443. )

I think VM do have their own usenet servers. I don't know how good they are though.

They moderate P2P traffic from 5pm to Midnight on weekdays and midday to midnight on weekends. More on this LINK

VM do have their own (external) free usenet service which covers most of the more popular groups - the only problem is the retention is dreadful: maybe 4 days!
However download speeds are perfect outside of the throttled periods.

I think VM still offer a 'no quibble' 30-day money-back guarantee if you're not happy with the service.

What are their servers?

The server is at news.virginmedia.com but I suspect you can only access it from a VM IP.
The service is actually provided by Highwinds in Amsterdam.

Does anyone know the what the download speeds are like on VMs Usenet servers?

I've just downloaded something from the VM news server and SABnzbd reported a speed of 3.75MB/s - I'm on 30meg so thats pretty much full speed.

If I download at 'peak' times it can drop as low as 1MB/s, but normally I get around 2MB/s. The traffic shaping is related to overall network load so is dynamic in nature.

I find the retention is at around 7 days - sometimes you'll be lucky and get longer, but don't rely on it.

Cheers
Grim

As its a free usenet service I would also check their retention time and also that it has the groups you are interested in

In reply to a post by Darkness123:

Does anyone know the what the download speeds are like on VMs Usenet servers?

I'm on the 20Mb service and get very close to 20Mb download speed when using 20 connections from VM's own usenet server except during throttled periods.