Frugal Usenet & Blocknews Added Another Usenet Server Location – Africa
A couple of notable things happened in Usenet land in the last month or two (notable only because big things do not happen that often in this space). Swintec (Owner) posted that Frugal Usenet added their last(?) server location.
I cover the second one here – SabNZB Pipelining
What Happened
Both Frugal Usenet and Blocknews (and also Usenetnow but you do not see much about that service) now list a South Africa server locations in their lineup. Any of the plans offered by these 3 brands include this access.
Reviews of it seem positive so far, albeit limited for one reason or another. It is hard to test overall performance from this end being so far from Africa but I can confirm it A: Connects just fine and; B: Gives the same access as the other servers
Who Could Benefit
Users of Africa. If you’re on the continent of Africa, local routing beats bouncing through a US or EU server. That’s basic networking.
The Reality Check
Usenet infrastructure is expensive. Setting up servers costs money, maintaining them costs more money. So either they think there’s a real market in Africa, or they’re just checking a box to say “we’re fully global now” and they are certainly leaning into that marketing as of late.
I’m skeptical it’s the former. Usenet isn’t exactly booming on the continent of Africa. So this might just be a marketing thing, “look, we have seven server locations!” when in reality three of them probably handle 95% of the traffic.
Honest Take
If you’re in Africa and you’ve tested the Africa server and it works, cool. Then it’s genuinely useful and was a good addition.
To be honest, I actually really like what they have done over the last few years. Prior to this site being active, they added Australia servers in 2024 and then later on Asia and Brazil servers. These have been out for awhile now and seem to have much more positive reviews so their plan seems to be working well overall.
Several (new for Usenet) offerings have come from Swintec and the team over the last 10 years that have worked out well enough where the competition have adopted the same features, but these features did not really have a huge cost (or really, a cost at all) for competitors to roll them out. The same can not be said for plopping down one new server location let alone 4, so it will be interesting to see if competitors attempt to play catch-up or take a gamble and roll out a location they hope will work out against one of these that already existed for over a year.