Apparently somebody at PCCW/BtN does not like me very much.
Now let me explain.
I have been using Usenet as my primary source of information gathering for the past 9 months. I have had good experience with UsenetServer and Newshosting although I ended up sticking with the latter. On the Grande connection at the DKE house I could easily hit 800KB/s download speeds while connected to Usenetserver, and it was wonderful. Usnetserver unfortunatley had some server and completion issues so I switched to Newshosting opting for better completion but slightly lower speed. This was about the same time I moved to my new apartment and changed to Time Warner’s Roadrunner, which only is limited to 5mbps or 600 KB/s. This worked out great because that also happens to be the Newshostings limit. That was until a few days ago when after 30 hours of solid bandwidth saturation all usenet traffic dropped to 200 KB/s. I immediately wanted to blame Time Warner but I checked other services and found they could run at full speed. I did remember that you could force your Newshosting traffic through a specific Level 1 interface on their server in case of problems with the autonegotiated path. I had three ports to choose from: Cogent, ServerCentral, and BtN; so trial and error led me to BtN as the culprit. Luckily Cogent loves me.
