Giganews

The World's Best Usenet Provider

The History of Giganews, The World’s Best Usenet Provider

Serving consumers, Internet service providers, telecommunications companies, and multi-service operators in over 170 different countries, Giganews is the undisputed industry leader in Usenet services.

1994 – How It All Began

In late 1994, several foresighted entrepreneurs powered up a Sun SPARC Classic workstation and created one of the very first Internet service providers. That workstation also became the first news server in what was to become the Giganews phenomenon.

These entrepreneurs dedicated themselves to building the best newsfeed in existence and setting the new standards in Internet Service. Though constantly searching for and adding new hierarchies and newsgroups provided a high level of service, Giganews went one step further to create robust and global peering arrangements, ensuring nearly instant articles and post placements from anywhere in the world.

As the size of the newsfeed grew, Giganews provided additional storage to maintain retention rates, and fresh new approaches to server management were implemented to keep pace with the continuing growth.

1998 – Rapidly Expanding Newsgroups Service

In the summer of 1998, Giganews officially opened its news servers to the world and launched a member-friendly website portal interface. As other independent news services started to establish themselves in the Internet community, word of Giganews’ high-quality newsfeed and exemplary member service started to get around and the service offerings expanded.

2000 – The Move To Broadband Usenet

As broadband options became more ubiquitous, Giganews was quick not only to recognize the changing face of the Internet, but also to modify its service offerings based on member requirements.

2005 – Size, Speed and Quality Lead To Industry Leadership

Over the last several years the size of the Giganews newsfeed has grown exponentially, and on any given day tens of million articles on the Giganews servers are stored. Giganews optimizes delivery speeds around the globe by utilizing multi-homed Gigabit+ connections to multiple Internet backbones, and offers the highest retention rates in the industry.

Diversity of upstream routing provides an outage-proof infrastructure and ensures the articles you request are delivered as fast as your Internet connection allows.

Due to the exponential growth of Usenet, Giganews continues to deploy innovative management of servers and storage. For instance, the Giganews Cluster consistently sets the highest standards in the Usenet industry for retention and completeness. Members enjoy the following industry-leading retention rates:

  • 3+ years in binary newsgroups
  • Over 18 years in text newsgroups
  • 99%+ completion rate

2022 and 2023 – New Team, Innovation, and Investment

In 2022, a band of Usenet nerds (and Giganews fans) acquired Giganews from the founders and (working with the same wizards who built Giganews in the 1990s and 2000s) we’ve been madly building on amazing technology created by Giganews over the decades.

We have launched:

  • 20+ years of text retention
  • 5 years and growing of binaries
  • A new Chicago POP

…with more to come!