I use some of the download accelerators that can help you to get more
bandwidth in a crowded LAN.
1) aget
2) axel
3) lftp with pget or -P
For upload there are no accelerators. I use curl to do FTP uploads.
scp is also used or rsync is used.
Download accelerators work by using multiple TCP connections that
obtain extra bandwidth at the cost
of other local users.
But it obviously cannot get more bandwidth than what your WAN gives.
Not all HTTP and FTP servers allow multiple connections but many do in
my experience.
A file is fetched portion by portion in each connection and then assembled.
It is complicated coding.
And p2p protocols like bittorrent or gnutella have this ability
automatically but it also uploads whilst downloading.
If your firewall does QoS to allow bandwidth for important skype video
then you may not be able to circumvent it.
-Girish
--
Gayatri Hitech
http://gayatri-hitech.com