Wikipedia states that Usenet is a global, decentralized, distributed Internet discussion system. Within Usenet, there are newsgroups for different types of threaded discussion, typically accessed through newsreader software. However, discussions aren’t the only things taking place on Usenet newsgroups. The alt.* hierarchy of newsgroups, for example, is home to binaries newsgroups where people may upload and share files ranging from HD television shows and movies to software and music.
Unlike BitTorrent, a popular peer-2-peer communications protocol, download from newsgroups only requires downloading from a server rather than downloading from peers and uploading to peers. As such, downloading through newsgroups is typically extremely fast, given a proper Usenet service provider. Also, you are only connecting to your Usenet service provider so it is less risky than downloading with BitTorrent where peers can see the other peers.
Just to give you an idea of the speed, if you had a large queue of files to download over a typical 6 megabit Cable Internet connection, you would max out the line and exceed 2 Terabytes of bandwidth consumption in a single month. If you lived on a college campus with a fat pipe (assuming fat = 60+ Mbps), that number would be closer to 20 Terabytes. But sure people would not downloading the whole day.
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