Altopia is a really old Usenet service provider & they have been around for a long time. It has been almost 16 years since Altopia is offering their services. But the saying “old is gold” does not really apply in case of Altopia’s services. Altopia presently offers Usenet services to individual users, but their primary focus has always been the ISPs. Services provided by Altopia is not at all competitive compared to other Usenet providers. Let’s take a closer look.

Retention: Retention offers of Altopia are a huge negative about its services. They only offer a binary retention of 8-20 days & text retention of 220 days, which is just not enough in today’s Usenet market where other Usenet providers are offering binary retention of 1000+ days.

Speed: Altopia offers an unlimited speed of download & upload. But the actual speed you get would depend a lot on the speed you are getting from your ISP. They have servers only in the US, providing high speed connection to their users. Absence of any server farms outside the United States is another downside of Altopia’s services.

Completion rate: Altopia’s completion rate is still unknown. But it is believed that they have a pretty good completion rate to offer their customers.

Newsgroups: Number of newsgroups is a positive point of Altopia’s services. It covers more that 124,000 newsgroups to with its services.

Pricing: Altopia offers the following price plans to its customers;

• Unlimited transfer, speed & usage with 2 simultaneous connections per IP – $6/month.
• Unlimited transfer, speed & usage with 5 simultaneous connections per IP – $9/month.
• Unlimited transfer, speed & usage with 10 simultaneous connections per IP – $12/month.
• Unlimited transfer, speed & usage with 15 simultaneous connections per IP – $15/month.
• Unlimited transfer, speed & usage with 20 connections per IP – $18/month.

All these plans also include secure SSL connections. The pricing plan of Altopia does not seem to be quite competitive. There are better options available in the market.

Free trial: This is another negative of Altopia’s services. They do not offer ant free trial to their potential customers. So, if you want to check out the quality of Altopia’s services you would have to shed some dollars for it.

Security/anonymity: Security & anonymity is guaranteed with Altopia’s services since all their connections are SSL encrypted.

Customer support: This is another front where Altopia falls short compared to other Usenet service providers. They provide customer support through email only, where you will have to wait for 24-48 hours (at times even more than that) to have your queries answered.

Payment options: You can pay using your credit cards only.

Conclusion: Altopia is old school & highly respected. But that does not hide the fact that their services are way below what Usenet users expects from their providers. The pricing of Altopia’s services is also pretty high. Retention rates are low. That is why; we do not recommend Altopia to any Usenet users out there.