At first I thought it was my wifi. But then it started happening on my desktop.
I'm using the 25GB Just Broadband plan (with two iTalk lines, which is irrelevant), and frequently experience dropped downloads using anything (BitTorrent is okay though)
Basically, what happens is, any file I download, if it takes a while to come down (say, three to five minutes,) there is a very good chance of the download stopping at some point. Firefox and Opera will report 0kB/s, Chromium will show no progress being made, while the transfer rate slowly drops toward zero (AFAIK it shows the average), and wget will show --.-K/s while the ETA climbs to infinity.
I've been using wget, because Chromium doesn't resume the download when you pause/unpause it, and I don't use the other browsers enough to bother. Wget can use the -c switch and resume the download, but it doesn't work too well (-c switch or not) with things like YouTube video downloads and sites that generate temporary links to prevent bots from leeching their stuff.
The thing is though, I shouldn't have to use something like wget. Never mind the atrocious off-peak speeds, I just want to be able to be certain that any kind of download over 5MB will hold out. Even TinyCore got dropped once! TinyCore is a 11MB ISO! -argh- If my phone got 3G here, and i had more data, I'd use that as a modem: it's definitely more reliable.
/rant
I'm not sure what the cause of this problem is. My switch and router are fine. The line is stable, and has been connected for as long as 7 days at a time.
But anyway. Random stoppages in downloads. Who else experiences this?