If your download speed was good, but has fallen off, try power-cycling the cable modem (reported as effective with the Terayon series).
The following strategies apply for improving download speeds (apart from all the physical configuration and debugging advice elsewhere on this site):
For UK cable users, there are full easy-to-navigate web mirrors of the following major download sites:
Downloads via the web (HTTP protocol) are degraded by the presence of the web proxy caches. The FTP protocol is not intercepted by the transparent proxy caches. If your source site permits FTP downloads, choose FTP in preference to HTTP. The disadvantage of FTP browsing is that it is not as user-friendly as having informative web pages guide you to the right download. You have got to know what you are looking for with FTP.
Dragging huge downloads from overseas is bound to be slow: the USA internet backbones and the transatlantic links are often overloaded. If you can find your download on a UK mirror site, your download is likely to be faster and less subject to disconnection. Once again, you have got to know what you are looking for, as the mirrors are of FTP source sites.
| mirror.ac.uk | sunsite.org.uk | |
|---|---|---|
| by HTTP | http://www.mirror.ac.uk/ | http://sunsite.org.uk/sunsite/archive/ |
| by FTP | ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/ Look in directory sites |
ftp://sunsite.org.uk/ Look in directory Mirrors |
Both these sites have identical path structures for FTP and HTTP. If you browse by HTTP and find a URL for a file that you want, you can just edit the URL to change the protocol from http:// to ftp:// to initiate a download via FTP.
You can use the dual-protocol property of these sites to get a feel for the penalty that the transparent web caches are imposing on download speed: first time the download of a large file by FTP, and then time the download of the same file by HTTP. If the HTTP download time is much larger (download speed smaller), then it will the effect of the web caches.
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