Astraweb Newbie Help Please

[leviathon]

Hi, I've just signed up for Astrawebs $11 p/m deal, it's been a long time since I last used newsgroups so I followed the simple guide I found for setting up with alt.binz on my nzb indexing site.  When I signed up I was given 2 servers to connect to (news.astraweb.com and eu.news.astraweb.com) - at the moment i'm using the first one, but I also noticed on the Astraweb members area there are other SSL servers as well, i'm not sure if I need to use these instead?

The second thing is that my speeds are terrible and confusing, according to Alt.Binz i'm getting 61 kb/s, which I converted to be roughly 500 kbp/s?  This sounds about right as my speedtest.net results indicate i'm getting 5.1mb broadband, however the problem is despite this a 78mb file downloaded in newsgroups has taken me the best part of 45 minutes to download    Anyone got any ideas please?  I'm with a new ISP so i'm not yet being traffic shaped and torrents appear to work okay.

[Hecks]

Yes, you should certainly try the secure server, add it to Alt.Binz as a new primary (deselect the others), check the SSL box and make sure that port is 443 or 563. You should also raise Number of Connections to see if you get better speeds (maximum for Astraweb is 20).

With a 5Mbit connection, you should be getting around 600 KB/s (5000 / 8) speed, so if the above doesn't work you should do some trouble-shooting:

1) Switch off firewall and any antivirus temporarily (check also whether NNTP traffic is scanned)
2) Open command prompt, type: tracert news.astraweb.com
This should tell you if there are any network problems.
3) Check your ISP's fair usage policy - some simply throttle all connections regardless if usage in peak time is over a certain amount.  So try at different times of the day.