The Avvanta NNTP (Usenet News) service has been updated. The news server accepts NNTP Authentication rather than relying upon IP address to authenticate access as it did in the past. The advantage is that the SuperNews news feed provided with your account can now be accessed from anywhere, not just from Avvanta dialup or DSL connections. The speed of the connection has also been altered.
When authenticating your news connection, use your full Avvanta email address as your username. (eg nobody@avvanta.com)
The previous feed provided an individual news client (2) simultaneous unmetered connections to the news server, each rate limited to 256Kbps. (512Kbps total) We've recently renegotiated our news service and the server now allows a single news client (3) simultaneous unmetered connections to the news server. Each connection is rate limited at 128Kbps. (384Kbps total) Overall throughput is slightly less with this setup, but by allowing clients to thread a third connection to the server the overall performance of news downloads should be comparable, especially when subscribed to multiple groups. Note that as before, header downloads are not rate limited in any way. Only individual article retrieval is subject to the speed limitations.
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