Could be my bandwidth was being used for other things when you tried, so you should be able to reach your limit with the right host. It really is tough to tell if slow downloads are because of the host (most common), handicapped user set up (quite common, with router/firewall settings), bugs in the code or ISP policies.

Just keep trying--glad to hear that at least you now know your setup can achieve 50KB/s. Sure beats modem connections!