Not that that isn't awful, but 2Mbps is 4 times slower than 1MB/s...

Sure. Actually we rarely get even that, except on domestic transfers. 1MB/sec is best-case, torrent-only scenario ~1-5AM. Makes you value mirror operators.

Around 300 kB/sec lets you get 1GB/hour, which means you can get a perfectly watchable 1080p movie in 2 hours. Yes it's nice now that I have 3 MB/sec down, but it wasn't hell before and I lived with that for 10+ years. Many people still have this kind of connection - typically billed as 5000 down / 800 up. Streaming, I have no idea.

Rest assured, I don't use the internet to download television.

Oh, that's interesting. Sorry for stereotyping you as a torrent user. What kind of large files are you downloading?

~every nonfiction book posted.

YOU don't complain, even though it's slow, at least it isn't metered :/

I get 10GB/mo and it's $15 for every GB I go over. I'm a "giant pirate" and would usually go through that in an afternoon when I had comcrap. Oh well.

$15/GB is a lot. My cell phone plan charges only $5.

There is something wrong with your connection; where are you? I'm in Suzhou, I have no problem maxing out my connection downloading things outside of the GFW. It starts slow but speeds up about a minute in usually. With VPN turned on I am capped at about 10Mbps. Direct lines are easy to get, we had one for a while but decided getting everyone needed a connection, a VPN account was enough. We were paying US$2k for a 10Mbps "dedicated line" to HK.

You're next to Shanghai. I'm in Yunnan. Different world.