Can usenet be used for free?

There are projects that provide access to text-only groups. See for example http://www.eternal-september.org/

I took a walk around Usenet a few months ago after I discovered that my ISP (Teksavvy, Canada) offers access, and I must tell you... it's ugly. The groups I checked are either entirely abandoned or there's a post every two months, and they're overridden with spam.