brickboo,

Download speed roughly depends on three factors:

a) your internet connection speed
b) bandwidth capacity (and the load) of the route from your PC to the server you are downloading from
c) internet connection speed (and the load) of the server you are downloading from

Factor b) is in most cases irrelevant because routes between the servers are with much higher capacity then connection speeds of servers (or your PC).

Factor c) tells you that even if You have high speed connection to the internet (let say 4 Mb/sec) it doesn't mean you will always achieve that download speed (512 KB/sec in this case) because of two reasons.

Reason 1: Connection speed of the server (or PC if we are talking about peer-to-peer services) is lower then yours (in that case max. download speed will be the connection speed of that other PC/server).

Reason 2: If there is lots of connections (other then Yours) on the specific server/PC then the bandwidth of it's internet connection is shared and the speed will be reduced acordingly (for instance if you download from server connected at 512 KB/s, and there is 4 PC connected to the server, that is you, and three other users, your download speed will be 128 KB/s).

Anyway, when acquiring new high speed internet connection, choose the speed according to Your needs, and financial abilities (there is no need to buy extra high speed connection and paying lots of money if you use just a fraction of it.

[This message has been edited by kalimero (edited 12-17-2007).]