I was excited to move and be able to get True 8 Mbps. However I use a paid newsgroup reader called Graboid and it just crawls along at 20 kbps or so,with a lot of speed variation and then ends up stopping completely and will not restart without rebooting the modem. With maxnet Premier, Graboid was consistently and steadily downloading at the maxed out speed of 200 kbps or so with no problems.

Anybody have any experiences with True and Graboid or Easynews or other newsgroup readers (I think that's what they are called?) Anyway to work around this? I'm not really savvy about ports and things like that. It looks like I might need to be though......

Popular torrents are downloading at 900+ kbps. I never thought I would see that speed in Thailand and who knows how long that speed will last for me.

on the torrents with 900+ I have always 1 Thai seeder who contribute 800 K (or 2 with 350 and the rest from outside).

It sounds like True is restricting the usenet port (119 iirc). Does your provider offer encrypted connections on alternate ports? I was with Giganews before and they had secure ssl connections of port 443 and 563 if you paid a bit more. Maybe your provider would let you do a 24 hour test to see if it fixed your problem.

Thanks Veazer. Looks like I've finally got to figure out ports etc. etc. Any suggestions for good reading? Graboid is usenet downloading for idiots. When it works thought its great!

You can test port/traffic shaping with this free program
Detecting ISP Traffic Rate-Limiting

I use Giganews with an encrypted service on not the usual port. My Newsreader is NewsbinPro this allows multiple connections to Giganews.

Although my account with Giganews allows about 20 connections I use only 8 and my 2Mb TOT line constantly downloads at between 1.8Mbs and 2.3Mbs !!!!!

All in all very happy with the service. Have asked TOT to increase my speed to 3Mb or 4Mb but they constantly say the line is not good enough. I don't think they have even tested it because when I first start the Downloads the speed goes up to nearly 3Mb before their equipment starts to limit it.

Chris

I spent about an hour on the phone yesterday with the True technician and a customer service translator. The woman doing the translating was brilliant. She spoke perfect English and was patient, interested in helping and intelligent. Although they could not fix the download problem they allowed me to use their test password/service which allowed the downloads while they further researched the problem. I guess I should have tried calling them from the git go........