[sitkack]

As person who has used github on totally lousy connections in remote parts of the world, it faired far better than most Isomorphic web apps. People in Nepal can use github to actually get work done. Most current generation web apps won't even load.

[contingencies]

I second this from China. Apple Appstore based OSX updates are literally impossible here. Annoyingly, they are required to upgrade Xcode.

[sitkack]

One technique I used is to download updates directly via

    wget -c --limit-rate=200K http://support.apple.com/downloads/DL1833/en_US/osxupd10.10.5.dmg

-c resumes download where left off, the rate limiting can be used to match the speed of your connection or intermediaries reducing stalls, drops and angry network users. I would often keep a list of URLs in `download-queue.txt` and use the above flags with -i to load the list of urls, letting it run overnight at some much lower speed.

[contingencies]

A download manager would be fine if there was a non-opaque method of determining the download address, and they actually let you do that (I know the developer site for instance uses some combination of cookies/referrers to limit external access to binaries presented for download).

[sitkack]

I haven't tested this specifically, but I did something similar

https://gist.github.com/dbr/294151

extracting cookies out of Safari so I could download developer binaries from apple.