Hi.

Also, I doubt that that much backbone traffic is really spent distributing news articles. You have to realize that there are fairly few news servers that actually house those big newsgroups. (Probably one or two for each major ISP, one for each major university, one for each commercial news source -- likely less than a thousand worldwide.)

My ISP (one of three actually) uses a two-staged news system, one news server (diavolo) at its IP uplink, one on the internal network. Additionally, it has a satelite news feed from cidera. Well, the satelite feed carries "only" about 95% off all news posts (but supposedly 100% of the groups that are publicly available). It still reaches 10Mbit/s 24h/day. After removing the top 10 newsgroups (among those one or two alt.binaries.multimedia.*) about 4Mbit/s are left, removing the top 25 newsgroups, the whole bunch drop below 1Mbit/s.
Taking into account that this particular ISP (with about 500 customers) has a 2Mbit uplink only, that could easily be eaten away by news only.

cu,
sven