as said above

one thing i always have to remind people is that you may have a great connection that sucks data down like a hoover but if teh person teh other end does not then you are goverend by their speed.

of course if there are multiple people hosting the file you will end up downloading from multiple hosts and tehre for your speed will increase along with that

also remember that the speed listed is what the person teh otehr end has clicked on and IIRC the default for limewire is 56 k modem so if the person teh other end does not change it to T1 T3 etc then even tho it says 56k modem you may get a faster connection