When should a company use FTP? You can use FTP in a secure intranet, or over a VPN, or when you want to distribute files to the public.
FTP pros:
- can be tied to specific user accounts and require user authentication
- can allow anonymous access if desired
FTP cons:
- easy target for hackers
HTTP pros and cons are the same as for FTP. HTTP may be less secure than FTP depending on which software you use for your HTTP server and which platform on which you are running the HTTP server and how you configure it.
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Network speed:
FTP vs. HTTP will not make any difference for downloading large files over dial up lines. The arithmetic of the situation describes your problem.
56Kbps ~ 5.6KB/second ( 56 thousand bits per second is approximately equivalent to 5.6 thousand bytes per second).
1 million = 1 thousand times 1 thousand
So 5.6KB/second will require 1 thousand seconds to download 5.6 million bytes.
It will also require 10 thousand seconds to download 56 million bytes.
Even if you get 115kbps that is still at least 5 thousand seconds to download 56 million bytes.
My calculator says that 5 thousand seconds can also be expressed as 83.3 minutes.
We know that 83 minutes can be expressed as 1 hour and 23 minutes.
This is the best performance that you can hope for. A lot of factors can make the process take longer. When I was using dial up it would typically take me 20 minutes to download 1 million bytes.
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What you might try to do is to compress the file at the source. Unfortunately the time that you gain transmitting fewer bytes might be lost due to less modem hardware compression.
As far as I can see you are stuck with downloads taking about an hour and a half or longer unless you upgrade your network hardware to some type of broadband.
Sorry.
