The Best Usenet Plans on the Abavia Backbone

First place in detail: EasyUsenet annual

EasyUsenet's yearly plan costs €3.98 per month, which makes it the cheapest way onto the Abavia network. Uncapped in volume and speed, 100 simultaneous connections, eleven years of retention, servers in Europe and the USA, Trustpilot 4.7 from over 640 reviews.

What makes this list interesting is second place: XS News runs on the same backbone with exactly the same retention and the same number of connections — at €4.95 a month and a rating of 4.8 from over 1,200 reviews. So choosing between the top two is not a technical decision but one euro against a tenth of a rating point. The article archive behind them is identical.

Abavia: a European Tier 1 backbone

Abavia is an absolute Tier 1 backbone. That means the network stores its own article spool and runs its own infrastructure, rather than buying a feed from another network and reselling it. That is precisely what separates a Tier 1 backbone from a reseller network — and it is not a marketing nicety, it has practical consequences.

The most important one: article completeness does not depend on a third party. A network that buys its spool can only be as complete as what its supplier passes through, and it loses articles when that supplier removes them or the supply relationship ends. A Tier 1 network decides for itself what it takes in and how long it holds it. Second, capacity and expansion are in its own hands rather than capped by what it can buy.

After Omicron, Abavia is the second-largest backbone in this database: around 20 of the listed providers serve from it. Its centre of gravity is Europe — most Abavia providers run their servers on European locations only, which means short paths for European users and European data protection law applying.

Why comparing by backbone makes sense

The backbone determines which articles are available at all. Two providers on the same network read the same archive — if an article is missing there, it is missing at both. That makes the choice of network the real technical decision, and the provider on top of it the commercial one.

Anyone after maximum coverage combines two providers on different backbones. Two accounts into the same archive hit the same gaps and buy you nothing. This ranking is therefore also meant as a building block: one account from here, a second from the Omicron ranking, and each covers what the other misses.

How this ranking is built

Every provider serving from Abavia with a twelve-month plan that is uncapped in data volume and speed is included. Providers buying from two backbones appear in both rankings — correctly so, since they do serve from both.

The backbone itself is not scored. It is the selection, not a criterion: every candidate shares it, and a criterion with an identical value sorts nothing. Scoring uses price, Trustpilot rating, retention and the number of simultaneous connections.

Why the offers differ so widely

Same infrastructure, very different products: this list holds plans from a little over four euros to almost ten euros a month, and the retention unlocked ranges from 3,000 to 4,500 days. That is not the network, it is the provider. Each decides how far back it opens retention for its customers, how many connections it allows and what it charges.

Also striking: many Abavia providers have no Trustpilot profile. Alongside established names the field holds a lot of small resellers. A missing rating is not scored as a bad rating here — it is not scored at all — but it is a reason to look more closely at a provider you do not know. If customer satisfaction matters most to you, the best-rated providers ranking is the better way in.