I'm not saying that it's not a massive amount of data, I'm just saying that because of the distributed nature of NNTP, the backbone usage is minimized. The backbone traffic should consists only of articles being shared between massive peers, which are fairly few. Any delivery to a customer's news server counts as standard delivered bandwidth, not backbone traffic, except in exceptional cases. But then, I'm just being a jerk and arguing semantics.
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Bitt Faulk