I dont know why indian ISP's dont offer news groups, but all accounts I got in the US had news groups from dial up's to dsl and cable. In fact the internet was for the most part done to get news groups since the web did not exist then. It also saves the ISP's a lot of bandwidth since news groups are local once the data is transfered once, even if there is a lot of it, last count I saw like over 11000. Its been a while since I used it but I think even something like outlook can be set up to access it. But a news program would make the task of getting programs and such things a lot easier. I never had to pay extra for it and I think any real Internet user would go with an ISP without access to it. Though now with the web it makes using things like this forum much easier and you dont know you are missing anything. At the time when galiticom came out with it, you still had no chance to communicate with others in this fashion except through news groups since forums were still only local until then.