Airnews Review

Last Updated: Feb 16, 2021

Airnews is no longer active and their website is no longer running. The review below is kept for historical purposes.

Deal / Special Offer / Discounted Pricing

They have no special or discounted pricing plans.

Free Trial

Airnews doesn’t offer a free monthly trial, but anyone can try their service for free in the period of seven days without any other obligations or hidden fees.

Plan / Price Offerings

Currently, they offer two packages for the clients:

• the first one has the pricing of $9.95 per month, has 2 high-speed connections and offers unlimited downloads
• the second one has the pricing of $19.95 per month, has 6 high-speed connections and also offers unlimited downloads
• although not a package, let us mention that they offer 7-day money-back guarantee if the client is not satisfied with the service

Connection Speeds / Server Locations

We have not tested the connection speeds of Airnews, but according to reviews they are fairly standard and are based on the chosen plan.  Server locations are in the US.

Technical Notes

During the company’s existence, they have upgraded their systems couple of times so let’s take a brief look to some on the previous system information:

• In the year of 1999, Airnews was running on multiple DEC Alpha 2100A AXP servers with more than 1 gigabytes of DRAM each and multiple 5/300 or 4/275 processors running in parallel. Their network was connected to the Internet by multiple DS3s (43Mbit each), 10Mbit full-duplex Ethernet and 100Mbit FDDI links.

• Two years later, Airnews was running on multiple Compaq/DEC Alpha 4100A AXP servers and multiple 5/466 processors running in parallel. Their custom software allowed them to archive more than 20 million articles (this number was 9 million in 1999.)

• In the following year, they have upgraded their servers to at least 2 gigabytes of DRAM each. Their custom software did not have limitations regarding article archiving, stating that it can archive tens of millions of articles and retrieve them quickly.

Quality of Service

We have not tested the service so we cant say for sure but we are guessing a 98% completion rate. The binary groups are retained for 240 days on their servers; on the other hand, the text groups are retained for more than 2000 days.

Customer Service

They offer different customer support services, providing support both through the telephone (toll-free in North America) and through e-mail.

Airnews Usenet Service Recommendation

As a conclusion, Airnews is a bit outdated with pricing and service offering — we feel the best choice would be  our Best Usenet Provider list that you can see there.