If you currently have a 56Kbps connection (notice the 'b') then your max dld speed should theoretically be 7KBps: remember the bit-to-Byte difference as 8kbps equal 1kBps. It had me fooled for a while.
With a 1500Kbps connection your max dld speed should be around 187KBps (it's fast. Believe me.). Of course getting it up to there is a totaly different matter as there are many factors to be considered: if you'll get DSL, then the distance between you and the server will affect connection speeds. You must also consider that some of your bandwidth is used to send/recieve signals and info to and from the Gnutella net (or something like that), so that's very probably why you haven't seen 7KBps but 5KBps so far (with the 56 connection).
If after changing the connection you still get relatively slow speeds then I'm sure it will be because your LW is not configured for optimal performance: before configuring it myself, I had speeds of around 15 to 20KBps on a DSL 1024kbps (=128KBps). Now I have already seen LW reaching max speed (around 125KBps).
You must also consider that you will not always get those speeds.

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iMac G4 OSX 10.3.9
RAM 256MB
LW 4.10.5 Basic
ADSL anything from 3 to 8Mbps/around 1024kbps

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