Well, read this guys, I couldn't beliefe it
I had a larger download, it was about 7mb... since we are behind a 56k modem, i knew I had to wait a little to be finished.... BUT.... I downloaded the first 4Megabytes with steady 9.5kb/s!!!! I didn't just watch the average, Netscape gave me, I saw that I downloaded about 3.5mb within 6 Minutes!!!!!!! After these 4 Megs, it started to drop, but really slowly. I am now at 6.5k/s....
Could someone please explain this ??? I liked it, but the physical bandwith is lower i think....

if you clicked on the url to start downloading it and walked a way and came back and hit save, it was already downloaded so it said that your downloading at that speed. either that or the modem reported wrong.

I know but at the time i hit save, it was at about 100k.....
The fact is, that i downloaded about 7 megs within about 20minutes....weird....

What kind of file is it?
Modems work with compression. Depending on the contents of the data, the file can be compressed at a high rate. Ex: 2000 times the character 'A' in a file will take up almost 2k on the disk. But you could compress it by saying I'm sending you 2000 times the character 'A', which might only take a few bytes. That's a very extreme example but I can imagine something like that would make it seem like you are downloading a very large file at a rate faster then technically possible.

Good point Mik
It was a pdf file... if you want to know which one: it is the Linux Cookbook from the LDP.... I don't think that it can be compressed as much, but may be....

Just on your point about downloading with netscape, I like to use Mozilla, but I'm on a modem with BT and get booted every 2 hours, so if I'm in the middle of a download, mozilla won't resume it. I can resume it with konqueror, however. The problem is I don't like to use kde apps since I'm using fluxbox. The solution is mostly to get the link from mozilla, and use lftp get -c to download it till it's done.
Hassle sometimes when people use scripts to locate downloadable items, and I can't navigate into the directories listed in the page source

I downloaded the file and after compressing it with gzip the file size went from 7494369 bytes to 3314553 bytes. That's about a 2:1 ratio. Depending on how good the modem compresses and the quality of your telephone line. You could probably get very similar results making it look like you are downloading a lot faster.

This could be it, MIK. I have never had speeds like this since then... may be I am going to download it again for fun and for having the whombling feeling of 9k/s