Thanks for clearing that up.I listened quite carefully to this presentation at the conference. Alan Bacher said that engineers investigating how this dude was downloading so much found 40 concurrent connections to a variety of international newservers. So clearly it was not just to the IS news server.
The number of threads or concurrent connections a user has does not impact on the congestion of a network. Only the total bandwidth used will do that. P2P apps and torrents can use thousands of concurrent connections on a single machine.
One chap downloading at 4mbps 24/7 is not, in itself, going to have any major impact on the IS network. But if hundreds or thousands do the same, the impact will be major.
BTW - would it be safe to say that ISs international capacity is far more limited and that a smaller number of heavy users would have greater impact?