Yeah...best I typically get as an average on a long update is just under 1Mb/s on high-speed cable. It wil start above 6Mb/s and bounce all over the place, pausing, shooting through in chunks, pausing. It's all those @#$@#$ little files. SE really should have set the updates up so they downloaded packed files and then kicked off a utility to unpack them.

Compare sending 2000 pictures as a big batch in a folder versus a single ZIP file containing all the JPEG's. Even though they wouldn't likely be compressed in the ZIP file and will still be the same amount of data--it will go in a FRACTION of the time because it won't be stopping every couple of seconds for handshakes/verifications for every single picture in the list.

That is why the torrent or .RAR compilations at the BG forums became so popular. Can download full GB's worth of DAT/ROM files as a single package in no time by comparison to the in-game download.