Company Info
With almost ten years of experience in offering premium USENET News service, Airnews has evolved into one of the most technologically sophisticated USENET News services in the industry. At Airnews, our constant focus is to deliver the very best, totally reliable, and consistent access to USENET News for our customers at the lowest possible price.. Our customers enjoy unbeatable e-mail and telephone customer support. Airnews is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Our servers are housed in state-of-the-art facilites provided by Internet America, a leading Internet service provider offering a variety of services throughout the United States.

The Airnews System
Airnews uses a variety of equipment to provide USENET News services. Our latest generation of server equipment employs multiple-processor AMD and Intel servers. Other servers include the HP/Compaq/DEC Alpha servers as well as Apple X-Serve systems.

The typical Airnews server has two to four processors (32 and 64 bit systems), and several gigabytes of Error Correcting memory in each computer. New systems use multiple Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel connections, to provide the fastest access to articles.

Our main article storage systems have over 13 Terrabytes (13,000,000,000,000 bytes) of storage reserved just for USENET News articles. This vast amount of storage allows Airnews to keep binary groups for at least ten days, and text groups are kept 140 days or more. Article storage systems are protected by RAID with hot spares, so bad or failing drives are immediately detected and automatically replaced. Article storage capacity will be increasing to over 20 Terrabytes in Q4 2004, raising Airnews retention again!

Airnews uses heavily customized versions of industry-standard software. Our customizations allow us to store and manage millions of articles more than the stock software ever envisioned, and runs faster than the original, despite the enormous number of articles we need to keep track of. We also use the most reliable and stable operating systems and versions available.

Our unique software and hardware combination work together to allow articles to be rapidly stored and retrieved for you. If your Internet Provider suffers from an anemic newsfeed or short retention times, you will be amazed at the difference you can see at Airnews!

Our facilities are connected to the Internet by multiple optical OCx network links (OCx circuits run at speeds between 155Mbit/sec to 8.64Gbit/sec). We also have numerous DS3 (43Mbit/sec each) and other links, some of which connect to ISPs that provide Airnews USENET News services to their own customers.

Internally our networks use multiple Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel links, 200Mbit FDDI, as well as older 100Mbit switched Ethernet networks. We have had thousands of simultaneous users on the systems with no bottlenecks.

Our equipment is housed in climate-controlled facilities. We use continuously-operating battery/generator-powered uninterruptable power systems (UPS). Facilities are staffed 24x7, and both servers and networks are monitored for problems at all times, both by automated monitoring systems and by live humans!

Articles arriving and departing Airnews are filtered for spam and other forms of USENET abuse so that you do not have to wade through these junk articles, and eliminating these junk messages means that the good messages can be kept even longer!

Unlike some news providers who just state that they have high multiple-part binary completion, Airnews goes the extra mile by regularly analyzing completion levels regularly and Airnews actually provides the results to our customers.