I just moved and discovered after some trial and error that somewhere between my home and my remote server, there is some throttling going on...but the throttling is not very intelligent. It only throttles individual connections. So if I copy one 1 GB file, it will proceed merrily at 150 kBps. But if I initialize 10 copies, each of them will go at 150 kBps (i.e. I get much higher aggregate bandwidth over multiple connections).
I use rsync fairly often to synchronize some large datasets from work to home (fortunately in the form of many files). Is there a way to tell rsync to download using multiple connections? Theoretically it should be possible since as far as I can tell, rsync first does a pass to determine the necessary changes and then performs the actual transmission. Bonus points if there's a magic way of telling rsync to slice up individual files into N pieces and then splice them back together. I believe CuteFTP is actually smart enough to pull that off.