Why is it obvious that mail propagation will be faster than news propagation? News propagation times of small numbers of seconds are not at all uncommon.
News propagation in seconds to your _local server_, or to _distant_ servers?
To some (perhaps many, certainly not all) distant servers, provided all the news servers in the path run appropriate software (designed for low latency propagation) and have reasonably high bandwidth Internet links. Disk to disk delays smaller than 1 second have been measured between news servers that use software such as nntplink or innfeed to send outgoing articles immediately.
The Usenet is thousands of news servers, maybe tens of thousands, and news feeds take a while...small articles are mixed in with hundreds of megabytes a day of binaries. A percolation process, as opposed to a point-to-point process for e-mail.
Right. And some of those news links are fast, while others are slow. If two sites happen to be connected by fast news links, it's quite possible for news between those sites to be faster than mail. --apb (Alan Barrett)