Usenet: Ultimate Entertainment Solution for China Expats

With Special Technology Editor Jeff Goldrich, B.S.

Living in China for Western expats requires varying degrees of sacrifice especially if you were a particularly big fan of cable or satellite TV back home. In reality, outside of a few 5-star hotels in Beijing and Shanghai, there are no English language cable and satellite packages available for legitimate subscription within mainland China.

There is one omnipresent satellite pirate by the name of Yi Wangdong (English name Don) who does business under dozens of different names over the Internet. He steals various satellite packages from the Philippines and Hong Kong and then retransmits them through his own satellite dishes and propriety Internet servers for account verification (thus, you need an Internet connection to use his stolen re-transmissions). Do NOT do business with "Don" (Yi Wangdong). The video quality of the re-transmissions is terrible, there are frequent "screen freezes," and—as the owner is a master thief—after he has taken your money, he will fail to answer requests for service as there is no money to be made in service calls. (For more information about this thief, see our review regarding one of his many "doing business as" names China Satellite TV Service Center.)

A common alternative in China is to download one’s favorite TV shows and movies via Bittorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing network. Bittorrent is a fine solution when there are dozens of people sharing a file (referred to as "seeders") to every one person who is trying to download the file (referred to as a "leech"). Unfortunately, in most instances, there are a similar number of peers who are both sharing and downloading the same file, which results in painfully slow download speeds. For a file that has recently been shared, it could take several hours, even days to download that file. Consequently, peer-to-peer file sharing networks are not an ideal option for catching up on one’s favorite weekly television shows from back home.

Usenet News

Enter the world of Usenet. Usenet is actually an extension of the old text-based bulletin board systems (BBS) that were extremely popular before the Internet became commercialized. Unlike your typical BBS, Usenet servers are decentralized, i.e., there are thousands of Usenet servers throughout the Internet that communicate with each other for the purpose of synchronizing files and articles (collectively referred to as "news"). These files and posts are organized according to topic or focus of interest in what are referred to as newsgroups. It is estimated that there are between 100,000 to 110,000 different Usenet newsgroups in existence today.

While Usenet was not specifically designed for file sharing, it has proven to be an ideal vehicle for the rapid distribution of binary files because bandwidth allocation is determined by the user’s maximum download speed, not by the number of people sharing the file. That is, once the file (TV program, movie, etc.) is uploaded to a Usenet server, the speed at which the file can be downloaded is determined entirely by the user’s Internet account speed.

Commercial Usenet Servers: Speed and Reliability

As you can easily imagine, with hundreds of thousands of individuals throughout the world uploading files that are often in excess of 50GB (as is the case with uncompressed Blu-ray movies), the storage requirements of Usenet servers can be incredibly large. Consequently, most ISP and university Usenet servers do not host binary newsgroups, that is, only text-based newsgroups are supported. This policy (implemented as a matter of necessity) has created a cottage industry of commercial Usenet servers that specialize in the long-term retention of binary files with high completion rates. The issue of "completion rate" is obviously an important one, particularly as the size of the file grows. Large files are typically divided into and then uploaded as smaller segments of archived (.rar) files. Imagine downloading a 30GB file only to find that a small 14mb segment is missing. That obviously renders the entire download useless.

There are about a half-a-dozen commercial Usenet servers out there to choose from. With the exception of Giganews, which offers all sorts of unnecessary bundled options for a total price of $35.00 per month, most of the other Usenet servers offer around 1100 days of retention with 99.9% completion rates, and 20 to 30 simultaneous secure connections to their servers for a total subscription fee of around $10.00 to $12.00 per month. Although this is probably overkill, I subscribe to two Usenet servers for redundancy (that is, if one server is missing a file, then the second one is called upon to supply the missing segments). I use and can highly recommend Usenet Server and Supernews. Subscription plans vary by server but you typically have the option of subscribing by the month or even by the year for extra savings.

Usenet Database Search Engines

Unfortunately, simply having access to a high-speed Usenet server is not enough because these servers do not have built-in search engines. In reality, searching through these enormously large databases and correctly indexing and updating the files is a massive undertaking. Consequently, this is an additional service you will also need to purchase. Again, like the news servers, I subscribe to two different search engines because each one has its own set of strengths and weaknesses: NZBMatrix and Newzbin. I like the ability to filter out results by language offered only in NZBMatrix but Newzbin makes it a lot easier to download groups of files (as when downloading an entire television season of 22 episodes as one massive selection). If I had to choose one, I would probably go with Newzbin.

Newsreaders

Finally, you will need a special piece of software called a newsreader that knows how to parse and reassemble all those file segments that you will be downloading from your Usenet news server. I’ve experimented with a couple and can highly recommend Newsbin Pro: it has the most features and does the best job of reassembling the file segments. Both 32 (x86) and 64bit versions are available.

I have been recently informed about a free newsreader application called SABnzbd. I haven't used the application but I am told it is more than adequate. In addition, Sick Beard is a very cool helper application (technically referred to as Personal Video Recorder or PVR application) that works in tandem with the database search engines mentioned above (NZBMatrix and Newzbin) and SABnzbd (an excellent reason for using it). Sick Beard, also a free application, watches for new episodes of your favorite shows and, as soon as they are posted, it downloads them.

Internet Connectivity

Foreign residents in mainland China should be able to connect to the Usenet servers listed above (Usenet and Supernews) without the use of a virtual private network (VPN). However, using a VPN will allow you to circumvent overseas Internet "traffic jams" resulting from China's Great Firewall (ubiquutous censorship). We use and highly recommend Astrill.com and all of our readers who currently subscribe to it rave about it as well. Not only is Astrill.com one of the most reasonably priced VPN solutions for Western expats in China, but it is definitely one of the fastest packages we have tested.

What You Can Expect

Unfortuately, international Internet connectivity from China to the rest of the world is extremely unreliable. You can enjoy download speeds of 6mb/s in the morning and then find that—in the evening—your favorite sites are barely reachable. Assuming an average download connection speed of 4mb/s, you will be able to download a one-hour show in standard Divx format (approximately 400MB) in under 14 minutes. Double that for an average download speed of 2mb/s. That's not bad.

Expected Download Times: Typical Standard Divx Format, 1hour Show; 400MB File

Summary

To start enjoying the Usenet world of video (and all other file types) on demand, here is what you'll need:

1. Credit Card Account. If you don't have one from home, anyone can open a secured international credit card from the Bank of China (see our chapter on Banking in China for more information).
2. Subscription to a commercial Usenet server. We highly recommend Usenet Server or Supernews.
3. Usenet Server Database Search Engine. Recommended options are Newzbin and NZBMatrix.
4. Newsgroup Reader that can parse and assemble parity archive volume set (PAR) files. Newsbin Pro is the Cadillac of Usenet newsreaders. A free newsreader application called SABnzbd has less features but might be more than adequate for your needs and it works in tandem with a free PVR helper application called Sick Beard to automatically download new shows as they are posted.
5. Virtual Private Network: This may be optional if your international connection speeds to the United States and England are reliable. We use and highly recommend Astrill.com.