Download problems?

One of the problems faced when using the internet in a place like Afghanistan is that it is slow (and therefore downloads take a long while) and it is unreliable (and therefore your download is likely to be interrupted before it finishes).  This can be quite annoying.  Particularly because the built in downloading that comes with all web browsers is very simple and not capable of resuming after an interruption, and only capable of downloading linearly (that is, from start to finish).

A download manager

This is where download managers with download acceleration capabilities can be useful to you.  A download manager lets you resume a download after a network interruption – and if it is a download manager worth using it will do this for you automatically so you don’t need to be around while the download happens.  A download manager with download acceleration capabilities will not just download the file from start to finish but will simultaneously start downloads at various points throughout the file so that for example it can download the file in 6 sections simultaneously and by doing this download it almost 6 times faster than a linear download would have done.  All of these things improve your chances of getting the file you want and reduce your stress levels 🙂

There is a catch though.  The site you are downloading from must support download resumes for a download manager to be able to speed up the download or to be able to resume an interrupted download.  Most sites do support this these days but  some secure sites  will break that functionality with their login process.  You can always try putting your login details in the download manager’s properties for the download and you might be lucky and find it works, but sometimes nothing will work.

So what download manager would we recommend?

For Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer:

EagleGet (www.eagleget.com) is the download manager that has performed best for us.  We tested a number of download managers (listed below) by asking them to download a 3.7Gb file from a secure site.  This is a good test case as it is a real situation where a download manager can provide an advantage (large download) and a real situation that often doesn’t work (secure site).

• it was fast – it was significantly faster than a normal download.  It did change speeds constantly as the network quality changed but it always went as fast as it possibly could (which at times was extremely impressively fast)
• it didn’t give up – when the network was interrupted it didn’t give up trying.  It just waited until the network was restored and it kept plodding away
• it coped with changing networks – several times we changed from a DSL connection to a 3G connection and back to a DSL connection again and it wasn’t affected.  It just kept trying.
• it was able to recover from a failure due to security – every 24 hours the site that we were downloading from invalidates all old download links and issues new ones.  Right clicking on the download, which failed because of the link change, gave an option for refresh download address.  This opened a browser page where it tried to get the address again.  Due to the way the secure site worked that failed, BUT by opening the site freshly and logging in again, and starting the download again using the original link (without closing the EagleGet popup window that was watching the browser for a new link) when the download started again, EagleGet said “is this the new link you want me to use for your broken download” (or words to that effect) and when I said yes it continued the download from the point it had previously failed.  I’ve never seen a download manager do this before and am very impressed.