Speeding up File Transfers

[Steve Holmes]

I just got signed up to Sprint Broadband internet service here under the
impression I could get high download speeds near 100KBPS.  Unfortunately,
I am only getting transfers in the mid twenty's on a good day.  A test at
their demo FTP site yielded much higher results but I noticed their test
file was a nulls.  I'll bet the fact the file is all the same character
might result in "on the fly" data compression.

I haven't yet tried this on a winblows machine yet but all my friends
using the service with their winblows are getting speeds much better than
me.  I'm wondering if linux needs to be tweaked around a bit to speed up
file transfers?  I tried adding a window value on the route command for my
network setup but that seems to have no visible results.  

Does anyone here have any ideas?  It's better than dial-up but still far
short of expectations.

I will be glad to share whatever config files privately if needs be.

Thanks for any help.