Line speed of 15mbit and I am only getting 960k/sec I should be getting 1.8mb/sec and I can't figure out why I am not. I use 20 concurrent connections on Astraweb.
Another thing to note... just as more connections can help, less is sometimes the answer. MOST the time more connections can give you more speed, but your hard drive has to work a lot harder hopping back and forth. Its best to set your connections to a reasonable level that saturates your line (can't wear out), but not rape your hard drive as badly (does wear out).
This is of course less relevant (not impossible) if you have raid, and even less if you use 'article caching' available to contributors. However if your memory is low, with or without caching... you will swap a LOT on/off of your hard drive, creating a bottleneck across your entire system.
Summing it up, hard drives suck... where can we get those uber holographic drives people said were coming out any day now... what was that... 10 years ago? Seriously though, people here have claimed very high throughput on their lines using altbinz... if you have speed issues, its very likely you, your pc, your internet provider, your usenet server... or the universe just decided to take a crap on you... and everything will be fine in the morning.