How Big is Usenet?
At last count (Jan 2004), and not counting “bootleg” (those groups not properly set up) and “local” (those groups set up to be seen only by a service providers customers or for in house chat) there were somewhere north of 85,000 different groups on usenet. And the volume on the groups – the amount of data being passed through the feed is running about 1,080 GigaBytes each day – that’s one Tera Byte. This is up from 200 Gigabytes 2 years ago and 2 gigabytes 5 years ago. Simply put, there are a lot of us out there using usenet very heavily. And as broadband connections become the norm, this is likely to continue to put a strain on the resources. The current servers in place are having problems keeping up, are replaced, more come on line and more is posted, and the cycle is repeated. Think of the most congested road in the city where you live, then pass a law requiring every car in the city to drive both ways on that road each and every day. Pretty jammed up, uh? Now what would be the eas
