e analyze a special class of configurations with h sources and N receivers to demonstrate the throughput benefits of network coding and deterministic code design. We show that the throughput benefits network coding offers can increase proportionally to \sqrt{N}, with respect to the average as well as the minimum throughput. We also show that while for this class of configurations there exists a deterministic coding scheme that realizes these benefits using a binary alphabet, randomized coding may require an exponentially large alphabet size.