Many programs that claim to speed up download times work on the basis of managing the ammount of your bandwidth that is devoted to each idividual download or upload. Some even redistribute package sizes more uniformly to reduce the ammout of buffer data. How much this actually helps you though is widely varied. The ammount that it helps it also dependent on what your connection speed is to begin with. If you have 56k the inprovment may be so small that it is unnoticable, where if you have cable or dsl the improvement will be the same % improvement but it will be noticable becuase the ammount will be greater. Not sure if i explained that well but think of it like this: 10 + 1% = 10.1 1000 + 1% = 1010. same percentage difference but its alot more noticable with larger numbers.