Usenet server in New York, USA or London, UK?

I think mostly all usenet companys have servers located in USA, Being in the UK myself i have looked into usenet companys that have servers based in the UK and haven't found a single one that has.
 
Most (if not all anymore) of the large commercial concerns (Giganews, etc.) have in recent years moved their server operations to be as close to the internet 'nodal' (or border-router) points.

As an example, Giganews was in Phoenix for many years, then moved (a couple years ago), to the Reston, VA, area, outside of Washington DC. If you take a look at where the massive main internet routers are, you find the main chunk of them (for the eastern US) are in.... Reston, VA.

Astraweb is located in San Jose, CA, kinda the 'west coast distribution point' for the same.

For London, UK, the major nodal point is, in fact, in London, the 'Docklands' area. And so forth with the other European points (Amsterdam, etc.). But Europe as a whole is much smaller area than North America/US, so things are much more compact fiber routing wise.

As far as the North Atlantic fiber routes (US to Europe), virtually all of them 'land' either on Long Island, NY, New Jersey, or Rhode Island (just to the north of Long Island). The other ends terminate either in the UK or the Netherlands, mostly.
 
Beck38 said:
Most (if not all anymore) of the large commercial concerns (Giganews, etc.) have in recent years moved their server operations to be as close to the internet 'nodal' (or border-router) points.

As an example, Giganews was in Phoenix for many years, then moved (a couple years ago), to the Reston, VA, area, outside of Washington DC. If you take a look at where the massive main internet routers are, you find the main chunk of them (for the eastern US) are in.... Reston, VA.

Astraweb is located in San Jose, CA, kinda the 'west coast distribution point' for the same.

For London, UK, the major nodal point is, in fact, in London, the 'Docklands' area. And so forth with the other European points (Amsterdam, etc.). But Europe as a whole is much smaller area than North America/US, so things are much more compact fiber routing wise.

As far as the North Atlantic fiber routes (US to Europe), virtually all of them 'land' either on Long Island, NY, New Jersey, or Rhode Island (just to the north of Long Island). The other ends terminate either in the UK or the Netherlands, mostly.
Click to expand...

Astra is also in Phoenix.
 
Your best tools to see what kind of internet performance you have to a particular vendor, is to do a ping and then traceroute to them; good servers can do a 'reverse' traceroute, from their server plant to you.

Astraweb is not anywhere near Phoenix. Do a simple traceroute to their plant and you'll find they are located about 5 miles from where I used to live, in San Jose, CA. I don't believe, as I've been on usenet for close to 20 years, and had at least a 'fill'/block account with them for 10 of those, that they've never been anywhere else. Giganews started out in Austin, TX, moved to Phoenix, and then to VA. Highwinds used to also have a big plant in Phoenix, but moved to the DC beltway themselves a few years back, about the same time (although a bit later) than Giganews did.

As the amount of traffic gets larger, things tend to concentrate, but there are a few of the smaller operations with plants in Atlanta, Chicago, and Dallas, TX. I can usually tell when some router somewhere is 'on the fritz' or got programmed wrong by some tech somewhere, and the speed/throughput takes a bit of a hit.

This last week when some routers went wacky and even gave Google fits, I could see my throughput take about 5-10% of the top. If I didn't watch it, and run my somewhat pitiful link to the max 24/7, I'm sure I or other casual users wouldn't have noticed.

BTW, things are back to 'normal' now, slurping at the big usenet trough in the sky.
 
Beck38 said:
Astraweb is not anywhere near Phoenix. Do a simple traceroute to their plant and you'll find they are located about 5 miles from where I used to live, in San Jose, CA. I don't believe, as I've been on usenet for close to 20 years
Click to expand...

I did the Geotool when I first signed up and said they were located in Phoenix, now there in Cali...so that was almost 6 months ago when I did the ping and it came back Phoenix, at least that were there "homepage" was being hosted, it's not now..but now that I think about it it was almost 8 months and my 1st provider was Giganews, so I was right about Phoenix just wrong provider and wrong time :O
 
When Giganews was still in Phoenix, it was 'real close' to me internet wise (minimal hops, very quick response. As soon as they moved to VA the performance did that a bit of a hit 'off the top', so to speak.

Use to be like 6-8 hops from me, now it's this:

5 104 ms 24 ms 25 ms so-7-0-0-0.SEA81-PEER-RTR1-re1.verizon-gni.net
130.81.17.139]
6 202 ms 153 ms 131 ms 130.81.15.214
7 104 ms 219 ms 259 ms tge2-2.fr3.sjc.llnw.net [69.28.171.145]
8 195 ms 178 ms 119 ms ve5.fr4.sjc.llnw.net [69.28.171.210]
9 97 ms 101 ms 97 ms tge1-1.fr3.ord.llnw.net [69.28.171.65]
10 241 ms 266 ms 248 ms tge10-3.fr4.lga.llnw.net [69.28.172.197]
11 274 ms 177 ms 356 ms tge2-3.fr4.iad.llnw.net [69.28.171.153]
12 246 ms 265 ms 178 ms giganews.tge11-3.fr4.iad.llnw.net [69.28.157.38

13 332 ms 267 ms 113 ms g3-16.gw2.dca.giganews.com [216.196.96.61]
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 221 ms 157 ms 138 ms news.giganews.com [216.196.97.131]

Trace complete.

You can see verizon gets rid of the traffic as soon as possible, then it literally crawls across the continent over LimeLight Networks system, going through San Jose ('sjc'), Chicago ('ord'), New York ('lga'), until it gets to iad, which is the designation for the Dullas Airport area in the Washington DC part of Virginia. You can usually follow what's going on in the route, IF the guys programming the routers use some sort of obvious designation (in this case, airport codes which is VERY typical).

For those folks doing this, don't forget to use the 'NEWS.xxx.xxx' designation, like news.giganews.com, NOT the 'giganews.com', as that's the web site address, and that could be hosted (and probably is) just about anywhere.

Here is Astraweb:

5 211 ms 88 ms 24 ms so-6-0-0-0.SEA81-PEER-RTR1-re1.verizon-gn
130.81.17.137]
6 78 ms 191 ms 270 ms 130.81.15.214
7 111 ms 177 ms 274 ms tge2-2.fr3.sjc.llnw.net [69.28.171.145]
8 189 ms 207 ms 148 ms 69.28.150.2
9 301 ms 46 ms 45 ms unknown.sj.astraweb.com [216.151.153.62]

Trace complete.

So close I can almost touch them!

How about something across the 'pond', eu.news.astraweb.com:

4 175 ms 179 ms 177 ms so-6-0-0-0.SEA01-BB-RTR2.verizon-gni.net [130.81
.28.166]
5 125 ms 179 ms 177 ms 0.so-7-1-0.XT2.SEA7.ALTER.NET [152.63.105.61]
6 146 ms 178 ms 177 ms 0.so-2-0-0.XT2.SEA1.ALTER.NET [152.63.104.229]
7 153 ms 178 ms 189 ms POS5-0.BR2.SEA1.ALTER.NET [152.63.106.13]
8 163 ms 200 ms 266 ms oc48-7-1.car4.seattle1.level3.net [4.68.63.229]

9 192 ms 180 ms 110 ms ae-31-51.ebr1.Seattle1.Level3.net [4.68.105.30]

10 55 ms 54 ms 53 ms ae-1-100.ebr2.Seattle1.Level3.net [4.69.132.18]

11 80 ms 89 ms 89 ms ae-2.ebr2.Denver1.Level3.net [4.69.132.54]
12 97 ms 82 ms 82 ms ae-3.ebr1.Chicago2.Level3.net [4.69.132.62]
13 180 ms 82 ms 82 ms ae-1-100.ebr2.Chicago2.Level3.net [4.69.132.114]

14 140 ms 267 ms 269 ms ae-2-2.ebr2.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.132.70]

15 325 ms 267 ms 446 ms ae-44-44.ebr2.Frankfurt1.Level3.net [4.69.137.61
]
16 201 ms 326 ms 353 ms ae-2-2.ebr1.Dusseldorf1.Level3.net [4.69.132.137
]
17 190 ms 191 ms 360 ms ae-1-100.ebr2.Dusseldorf1.Level3.net [4.69.141.1
50]
18 413 ms 194 ms 194 ms ae-2-2.ebr1.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [4.69.133.89]

19 238 ms 461 ms 428 ms ae-1-51.edge4.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [4.69.139.13
8]
20 340 ms 265 ms 192 ms REVELATION.edge4.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [212.72.4
0.70]
21 318 ms 266 ms 192 ms unknown.ams.astraweb.com [193.202.122.125]

Trace complete.

This one jumps on level3 to go cross-country, then hits Washington before heading across the ocean (can't tell which TAT fiber it goes through), although since it hits Frankfort first and rattles around western Europe a bit before setting in Amsterdam, one might be able to figure it out.

There is a couple of pinging programs that will actually 'draw' a traceroute 'map' that are pretty neat.

Since I worked in this stuff since before the commercial internet even existed, it's always 'neato' to me. This is, after all, a wired planet, especially the last 20 or so years with all the submarine cables and such. But for those who are trying to teak out a bit more performance for what they're trying to do, it's almost mandatory.
 
Beck38 said:
There is a couple of pinging programs that will actually 'draw' a traceroute 'map' that are pretty neat.
Click to expand...

Any freeware one's that are good? I deal much with it since my speeds are fine and I generally have no reason for this kind of thing, but I would like to see one that draws it, and actually I was closer to Giganews, but I had to switch to Astraweb because of the price point.
 
While traceroutes TO your usenet providers are useful, I am much more interested in the routing from them to me. If I trace to Astraweb from my home I get sent via Limelight (the llnw.net) but using their traceroute function via their site shows that my downloads get to me via Level3. This is much more important to me if I am having slow or sluggish downloads as Limelight might be fine but Level3 could be congested. You really need both to be able to diagnose problems that might crop up.
 
unoriginal said:
While traceroutes TO your usenet providers are useful, I am much more interested in the routing from them to me.
Click to expand...

Yep, as I pointed out in a previous post, that's a 'reverse trace-route' and since the bulk of the traffic (since you're downloading) goes that route, that's where the rubber meets the road.

As for as a program the 'draws' the route via the 'tracert' returns, I haven't looked for quite a while, but I'd hop on Tucows and see what pops out of the woodwork. I think years ago the one I used was called 'ping tracer' or something like that, also had a feature that would ping an address and gather statistics like packet round-trip time and such, and graph them. Almost as good as some of the stand-alone tools (commercial) that cost >$1K and the like.
 
Back
Top