We are a member of Microsoft‘s Bizspark program… Awesome and highly recommended, it’s basically a free MSDN subscription for startups… We’ll be posting some more information about it soon, it really is worth investigating for all types of business.

Anyhow, we’ve been busily downloading server versions and application to create VMWare development environment from an ADSL 2+ link in the Sydney CBD. Normally this link will pull 1MB/s plus off a fast site – it terminates about 200 meters down the street from Sydney’s central exchange. My point – this was not the links fault. Anyway, today we had a download of Server 2008 coming down, and it wouldn’t get past 10kB/s… Not what we’re used to in here.

We did a bit of Googling, and through a combination of research and checking out the javascript call that the MSDN download section makes when it starts a download we realised that it was the mirror that were causing the issue.

The simple solution – cancel the download and start it again until you get a download rate you are happy with.

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