I’ve had a couple of emails from readers asking me to review a service called UseNeXT. I don’t use the service myself, but have several friends who are UseNext memers. In order to prepare for this review, I spent a few days familiarizing myself with the Usenext setup and gathering info from my friends’ experiences. Here’s what I’ve concluded.

First, let me explain what UseNeXT is. It’s a service provider that allows members to gain access to files on Usenet. These files may or may not be copyrighted; both types exist and are available for download. UseNeXT has three different membership levels that grant you either 10GB, 20GB, or 50GB of high-speed downloads per month. There is also a “Free Download” mode that allows you to download an unlimited amount of data — at an annoyingly slow speed.

As I mentioned, I played around with UseNeXT via a friend’s membership. The first thing I checked out was the search function. I wanted to see how easy it would be to find a particular file. I looked for a few popular television shows that I was pretty confident would be available, and they were. It was easy to get to them and easy to identify specific files by the names. However, one thing that threw me for a loop was the fact that a single TV show could be broken up into 20 or more files. But apparently, there’s a Download Wizard that automatically splices the files together so that you get a single .avi or .mpeg when everything’s done.

I downloaded some NON-COPYRIGHTED files to test out UseNeXT’s speed. It was incredibly fast, and in speaking to my friends, I discovered that, on average, it takes them less than 10 minutes to download an entire 1-hour television episode. I’ve heard of people taking hours to do that with other sites, so UseNext does indeed seem to compare favorably in this regard.

I asked my friends about any negative aspects they’ve uncovered in their experience with the software, and one of them told me that sometimes it’s impossible to find a particular file because it gets bundled or grouped with completely different files. For example (and again, this is just hypothetical, files for an episode of, say, Smallville will inexplicably be bundled with files from, say, Battlestar Galactica. But if you search for Smallville, you won’t see the files turn up in the results because they’re with the Battlestar Galactica filegroup. The search will eventually pick out the right files, but it could be days before that happens.

I’ve heard that some UseNeXT members have complained that their computers were infected with adware or spyware from the UseNeXT software, but my friends haven’t had any problems of that sort.

Overall, based on the little bit that I saw firsthand and my friends’ testimonials, I’d say that UseNeXT sounds like a pretty good deal for those who are into this sort of scene.

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