Let me see if I can offer some precise details to assist you, including things to do outside your computer.

I'm going to take a guess the connection you're using is Cable-modem based.  That's simply a guess based on speed, but since most home DSL connections are usually somewhat slower (and ethernet and fiber packages usually much faster) and I experience similar speeds in all the places I use cable modem based connections with 12-16 megabit service advertised, it's a reasonably well-educated guess.  This answer will apply to all types of connection (they are more the same than different), but the specific examples will assume cable modem access.

There are three areas you have to examine to maximize the speed of a download:
1.  Off Site
2.  At connection point
3.  At your PC

1.  Off Site
This is the hardest to control, since obviously you're not there, and have no control of things going on across most of the world (real or digital).  But there are still things you can do to optimize your connection outside your home or office.
A.  Choose the fastest server.
There may only be one server, or the server may be selected for you based on your location and the load of the servers at the other end (this is done by places like Microsoft who have a lot of traffic, it's called load-balancing).  If it's done for you, all the better.  If you're using a site like one of the many game sites (IGN.com for instance), or other software sites looking to offset their bandwidth costs, there is often a "public" server and "private" /"paid" server option.  Of course you have to pay for the latter, but it is faster because they ensure a higher quality of servce (speed) to their paying customers.

You may also see listings for sever load, or for the speed of server connections (ie T3, OC48, etc).  Choose the least-used server with the fastest connection.  If the data cannot be sent to you fast enough, nothing else you do will matter.

B.  Choose the closest server (or the one with the least hops).
If I have a choice of servers (usually called mirrors), I will usually choose the one that is physically closest.  So if I live in the Midwest, a Chicago, St. Louis or even Denver server works well.  I wouldn't usually get performance as good from a server in Taiwan, for a number of reasons.  Also, the data simply has toe travel further, and more of it gets "lost" to congestion and interference, so it has to be resent more, which makes the effective download speed much slower.
C.  Route around congestion or failure points.
Controlling the route your data takes of the Internet is probably well beyond the average user (and there are limits to what the professionals can do in a practical sense).  But you can still think about what's going on in the world to avoid congestion/failure.  For instance, say I wanted to download a game demo on Tuesday.  Should I download it from Los Angeles (farther away) or from Boston (closer)?  Usually an easy choice.  But oops, on that server Boston's traffic gets routed through Washington D.C.  Being Tuesday, D.C.'s Internet connections were saturated with Obama-mania stuff for the inauguration.  So my connection would likewise suffer, even though it may not have been the origination point.  Better to download from L.A.
D.  Multi-source a download.
Bitorrent and other P2P protocols are your friends.  If a file is widely distributed, getiing it from 100 (slow) sources is still usually going to be faster than getting it from 1 moderaly quick source.  Many of these protocols are starting to adapt geographic and other systems, to further enhance their throughput.
E.  Avoid traffic through time-shifting
If you're downloading, download at 3:00 AM (central time).  4 AM is too early for most East-coast people to be heavily using their machines, and 1:00 AM is too late for most West-coast people to be doing so either.  During the day business traffic saturates the Inetnet, and in the evening personal traffic does.

2.  At Connection Point (wiring just outside and just inside your house)
A.  Reduce run length
Make the connection between the outside of your house and the cable modem (or other device) as short as possible.  This leads to less signal loss, less interference, and the best performance available at your location.  Usually I advise clients to mount their cable modem to the wall near where their cable comes into the house.
B.  Eliminate electrical intererence
If you can avoid it, don't have a cable (or phone) wire within 18 inches of an electrical wire anywhere along its length.  If you must, cross the electrical wire at a 90 degree angle, and don't run them parallel any closer than 18 inces.
C.  Eliminate cross-talk
If you're going to split your cable (or phone), do a 1to2 splitter first, one directly into your cable modem, the other for your TV.  From the TV line, you can then re-split it as much as you need to  for video (seperate signal splitting advice applies).  Also try not to bundle these or any other cables together with your Internet line, since they will still slightly interfere with eachother.
D.  Use best-quality equipment/parts
$1 radio shack cables make connections.  Places like Blue Jeans Cable make or supply way, way higher quality http://www.bluejeanscable.com/ at reasonable prices (Monster will charge you 2 to 3 times as much, sometimes for an inferior product).  Here's Blue Jeans info on coaxial cable  http://www.bluejeanscable.com/store/rf/index.htm

3.  At Your Computer
A.  Eliminate extra tasks
Turn off everything.  Screen savers, other programs, taskbar widgets, music.  Your computer should be as lean as possible.  Theoretically entering data in the built in calculator should do nothing to influence your Internet connection.  But why take a chance?
B.  Turn off filtering/monitoring software.
Since you're downloading a file you know you want, turn off everthing, antivirus, antispyware, etc.  Not as safe at all.  But these utilities often want to scan data coming in, and will tell additional data to wait or slow down so they can scan it all befor eit hits your machine.
C.  Disable anything that connects to the Internet, even infrequently.
Does Office go to check for updates?  Does your music player software?  Autotmatic Updates/Software Update for your operating system?  Anything it finds to download, even just a list of files to update, is still traffic you could have spent on your download.
D.  Stop other downloads.
This should be obvious.  Splitting a fixed resource across multiple tasks reduces the speed of all of those tasks proportionally (and introduces a little bit of overhead).
E.  Defrag your hard drive
This isn't always necessary, but it can help in severely fragmented situations (your computer has to look for where to put the data, or move around data to pu tit there), and it's a good piece of advice anyway.
F.  Use a download accelerator
I use Down Them All http://www.downthemall.net/ as a very good Firefox extension.  I've also used in the past to good success FlashGet http://www.flashget.com/en/download.htm ; but I prefer DownThemAll because it seems a little more streamlined and less intrusive for any given file (it asks instead of grabs).  These also often support failed download recovery.  That doesn't speed up your download by itself, but having to re-download 50% of a file before your computer crashed, as opposed to picking up where you left off, is a huge time savings.
Source(s):
Personal experience, installing and tweaking these sorts of things for personal and business clients, doing same at work constantly (EMI is evil).

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