After bowing to pressure and turning off access to binary groups last July, AT&T have hammered the final nail home in respect to free Usenet access to their clientèle by completely switching off access as of ~ July 15th 2009 - only a few days away now.
AT&T took a step further than other ISPs last July by blocking access to all alt.binaries.* groups - as opposed to the 88 groups recommended by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo giving the standard reason behind a lot of ridiculous decisions made by politicians these days: child porn.
However, on the 8th June last month (yes, slow I know but we didn't exist last month!) AT&T posted the following message to their internal newsgroups:
Please note that on or around July 15, 2009, AT&T will no longer be offering access to the Usenet Netnews service. If you wish to continue reading Usenet newsgroups, access is available through third-party vendors. Distribution: AT&T SouthEast Newsgroups Servers
As yet there has been no comment as to why they made this decision. While keeping binary servers can be a very costly experience with the sheer amount of storage and bandwidth involved - keeping the text groups alive requires minimal resources, hence why paid providers usually have text retention of 356 days plus - it costs peanuts to store and serve text yet AT&T have removed this service from their customers without reducing their monthly charge for those affected.
Luckily, they haven't decided to completely block or throttle Usenet off their network yet and so the paid providers have naturally been scrambling around setting up special one time deals to pick up the slack left behind by AT&T's decision. The first one to stand out to us (feel free to comment and send more our way) are Giganews who are offering 50% off their diamond packages and 20% off all other packages for AT&T's subscribers.
We'll hopefully have more info once the service is actually switched off, the statement from AT&T only on their internal newsgroups leads us to believe they're trying to keep the negative press due to this to a minimum, especially after the whole Comcast throttling Bit-torrent issue.
0 comments. Tags: atandt, isp, stopping-service.
After bowing to pressure and turning off access to binary groups last July, AT&T have hammered the final nail home in respect to free Usenet access to their clientèle by completely switching off access as of ~ July 15th 2009 - only a few days away now.
AT&T took a step further than other ISPs last July by blocking access to all alt.binaries.* groups - as opposed to the 88 groups recommended by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo giving the standard reason behind a lot of ridiculous decisions made by politicians these days: child porn.
However, on the 8th June last month (yes, slow I know but we didn't exist last month!) AT&T posted the following message to their internal newsgroups:
As yet there has been no comment as to why they made this decision. While keeping binary servers can be a very costly experience with the sheer amount of storage and bandwidth involved - keeping the text groups alive requires minimal resources, hence why paid providers usually have text retention of 356 days plus - it costs peanuts to store and serve text yet AT&T have removed this service from their customers without reducing their monthly charge for those affected.
Luckily, they haven't decided to completely block or throttle Usenet off their network yet and so the paid providers have naturally been scrambling around setting up special one time deals to pick up the slack left behind by AT&T's decision. The first one to stand out to us (feel free to comment and send more our way) are Giganews who are offering 50% off their diamond packages and 20% off all other packages for AT&T's subscribers.
We'll hopefully have more info once the service is actually switched off, the statement from AT&T only on their internal newsgroups leads us to believe they're trying to keep the negative press due to this to a minimum, especially after the whole Comcast throttling Bit-torrent issue.