First of all this is not a hack!  For reasons I have not been able to fathom, when I run a ftp server on my machine, the best upload speed I can get is about 40Kbs which is of course, way below the theoretical capacity of a 2Mbs upload plan, international links notwithstanding.  This has been a bit annoying and I have played around with the server configuration, looked at my router etc. - all to no avail. In fact one of the reasons I went with TCL was for their upload speeds - 256K is just inadequate these days when you want to video conferencing etc.

But more puzzling was, whenever I would do speed tests on the line, the reported upload speed is much better than 40Kbs so apparently the line speed is there.

My goal has been to share captures of the AB games (recorded off PrimeTV free to air television) encoded as divx to a friend in the US so he can watch them in a timely manner (so hold off seeing a result on the web).  Each half is about 250MB after encoding - a balance between quality and size.  But no matter what I do, he cannot achieve more than about 40Kbs on his download or my upload. But what was interesting was, when I split the games into two halves and he started downloads on each half simultaneously, he could get up to 35Kbs on each download!  So my line wasn't a constraint - there is some other bottleneck that I haven't been able to locate.

This weekend he tried a piece of software called flashget www.flashget.com

This software claims to speed up downloads by carving up files into smaller pieces and starting separate download sessions for each file.  It seems to work pretty well.  As I watched he downloaded the second half of the AB/Wales games (250MB) as 6 separate downloads, each running at about 30Kbs. So my broadband was supporting almost 180Kbs. The time taken for the whole file - about 35 minutes!  And he told me, the file pieces all arrived okay and flashget joined them up fine.

Just a tip for anybody else in a similar position