My company is in the process of setting up our office in the United Arab Emirates. Right now, they've got a 1 Mb DSL line (which currently isn't being used). The majority of the files we put on our ftp site are being downloaded from other various high-speed DSL lines, so I'm assuming it's comparable to the 1 Mb line. Anyhow, aside from the fact that we share our network traffic with user internet connections here in the headquarters office (which could obviously slow download speeds, and we're working to change that), it's taking our UAE office forever to download files, which at this point, are typically high-res images and/or PDF's used for project presentation boards (we're talking 1.5 hours to download one file). So I'm looking around at other ways we can compress our file size to perhaps help out with download speeds. WinRAR was suggested to me already. Do any of you know of any other good products or solutions that might help us in our endeavor? I'd be grateful to hear your suggestions.

you might want to check out 7-zip. it tends to get really good compression ratios. the only problem is it can take awhile to unzip big files, especially on a slower machine. are these all ibm pcs you're using?

Yes. I'll check 7-zip out. thanks!

yes, use the format 7z, which you can make with the freely available 7-zip. only use rar if you need cross-platform support, which rar is better at, and cost is not a factor, since the only program that actually makes rar files (and not just uncompresses them) is winrar, and there is only a 30 day trial period available.