Meets and Greets all. I am a powerusenet customer and a past giganews customer. I can tell you that they are NOT the same service. Whether Powerusenet is a reseller, or just uses giganews' pipelines, I have no idea, but I can tell you that I switched some time ago from Giganews to Powerusenet because PU had a much better unlimited access deal.
I have been running around on the internet since before the world wide web was even conceived. The good old days of Gopher and Unix shell accounts. *sigh* So, needless to say Newsgroups have been very important to me for a long time. Powerusenet is my favorite nntp service thus far. Here is why..
For 19.99/month I get:
Unlimited bandwidth, I average 6.0 Mbps on my cable ALWAYS!
Unlimited downloads, I download gigs upon gigs almost every week.
105 Day Retention(they JUST increased it)
12 Connections (I only use 1 connection because that gives me the most efficient download speeds, anything above 1 just adds file handling overhead and what-not)
I have not found any binary groups blocked yet.
I have not experienced any server downtimes yet (just been lucky as I know there have been a few reboots and maintenance events)
So, basically, I highly recommend PowerUsenet. They are NOT the same thing as Giganews, which cost a LOT more for an unlimited account back when I was using them. I don't know what their pricing structure is like now.
-Mark
{If you don't know what a newsgroup is, I am not going to tell you!}
{I'm not protecting the knowledge, I am protecting the newsgroup!}