Speeding up File Transfers

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.