What you get back from the host you are talking to depends on the options set by the user on that end. If the sending computer has, say, 16 upload slots, but only home cable internet, what you receive is going to be in the range of 1K-4K. Also, cable internet access, unless you are paying for commercial-grade, is roughly 256K-324K inbound to you and only 40K-64K upload from you. So, if you have 8 outbound connections evenly using the 40-64K of bandwidth, the individual uploads are only running at 5K-8K each. The same is true of the host(s) sending to you. Bandwidth into/out of a given computer is shared between all uploads and downloads. If you are dealing with a host running less than a T1 (I think that's probably most of us), you shouldn't expect the speed you get when you go to a website and download an executable using http or ftp protocol on the high speed connections most websites use.