Frequently asked questions about the news server.
What settings should I use? / Why can't I connect?
Server: news.power.net.uk
- Port: 119
- Authentication is not required
You can only connect to the Powernet news server from a Powernet IP address (i.e. you must be using your Powernet Internet connection).
What newsgroups do you carry?
Pretty much all of them. Please let us know if you think some are missing.
Why is it slow?
We pay a third party for our upstream news feed, for which we get a quota of so many gigabytes per month. Therefore, use of the news service is a finite resource. Experience has taught us a few things:
- More so than probably all of our other services, if left unchecked, a small number of customers can and will collectively exhaust our monthly quota; once the quota is exhausted, the news service becomes utterly useless until the next month starts.
- It tends to be a small number of people who consume a disproportionately large ratio of the news server's quota.
- The people who use up the news server's quota tend to be those who use the news server to download pornography.
Therefore, to protect the news server against quota exhaustion by a small number of users who download a large amount of data (which is mostly pornography), we apply bandwidth limits for those users. This is not a moral judgement based on the nature of the newsgroups in question; it's simply a pragmatic step we take in the interests of making the sure the service remains available.
If you think that the bandwidth limit may have been incorrectly applied to your IP address, please let us know (don't forget to tell us your IP address).