Another reason is that those "cable" hosts may be 56K with delusions of grandeur. I have had downloads from supposedly T3 hosts that stayed around 1-2 K/sec. for the entire course of the download. Chances are, they are fudging their prefs. Well, so do I. I have DSL, but if I want to take full advantage of my bandwidth and connect occasionally to more than six untrapeers, then I have to put T1 in the preferences. I have no idea what T1 is; we don't have it here, but I can tell from the IP's that most of the folks around here do the same.