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What Is It?
VOS—Usenet is a world-wide distributed discussion system. VOS—Usenet is the set of people who exchange articles tagged with one or more universally recognized labels, called "newsgroups" (or "groups" for short). The precise set of newsgroups that constitute VOS—Usenets are listed in the periodic "List of Active Newsgroups" postings which appear regularly in news.lists.misc and other newsgroups.
What's it For?
There are two Verizon VOS—Usenet offerings:
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Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) Routing: the "Full Feed Push" or "Group Filtered Push." This is appropriate for customers who wish to operate their own news server. A newsfeed is a server-to-server connection that is optimized to transfer the greatest number of articles. Our systems provide pushing and streaming feeds. |
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VOS—Usenet Newsgroup Reader Access: the ability to read all available newsgroups from the Verizon news Reader servers by using any of the standard Usenet Reader client applications (e.g., Forte Free Agent, Netscape Communicator, Microsoft Outlook/Outlook Express, etc.) that support Network News Reader Protocol (NNRP). This server is offered on a per concurrent reader access. |
How It Works
VOS—Usenet consists of a set of "newsgroups" with names that are classified hierarchically by subject. "Articles" or "messages" are "posted" to these newsgroups by people on computers with the appropriate software. These articles are then broadcast to other interconnected computer systems via a wide variety of networks. Some newsgroups are "moderated." In moderated newsgroups, articles are first sent to a moderator for approval before appearing (posting) in the newsgroup.
VOS—Usenet is available on a wide variety of computer systems and networks, but the bulk of modern VOS—Usenet traffic is transported over NNTP. When selecting your news server software, you will need to make sure that it can operate in this fashion. Due to the volume of news that flows through our systems, we strongly recommend that our customers accept streaming newsfeeds. Some popular news packages do not implement streaming at all. Of those that do, some don't enable streaming by default, so care should be taken during system configuration to assure that streaming is enabled. We do not allow the use of pulling or sucking newsfeeds.
How You Benefit
Newsreader access provides an organization the freedom of purchase, maintenance and upgrade of any hardware or software in a feed scenario. In short, it boils down to a "buy versus lease scenario." Customers can determine what percentage of their employees would be accessing Usenet on a concurrent basis. For example, a 2000 employee organization doesn't need to purchase 2000 concurrent "seats," they may plan for a percentage of employees accessing at any given point in the day. End users will simply populate the news server options box in their client reader software with a Verizon WITS2001 address.
Verizon has configured a robust upstream feed architecture that includes an upstream satellite primary newsfeed with several other terrestrial feeds for peering and backup. This presents Verizon VOS—Usenet subscribers with:
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A dramatic increase in level of service: VOS—Usenet upstream feeds have increased from approximately 25GB/day to 70-95GB/day. This translates into a wider range of access for subscribers. |
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Spam filtering: Verizon runs two spam filter cycles to minimize newsgroup spam to our subscribers. |
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