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.