[unwantedLetters]

I am in India, and have a connection that is 256Kbps. This is sufficient for most things, but I cannot get Lion from Apple.

I don't mind waiting for 40 hours for ~4GB to download, but the likelihood that a connection in India is sustained for more than 10-15 minutes is rather low. The problem here isn't with the speed (it is with that as well), but with the reliability of the connection. Even at 8MBPS, this download will still take about an hour and it's rare that the connection won't be randomly dropped during that hour.

Why can't Apple download these things smartly like BitTorrent? Why this behemoth of a download? Why not break it up into smaller pieces of ~10-20MB each, with a checksum for all these pieces so that WHEN (in India it's WHEN, not if) the connection gets dropped, you're only effectively losing 10-20 MB of downloaded data, not losing an entire GB or more of downloaded material. To me, it almost seems silly not to do this. Is Apple really this ignorant of flaky internet connections?

[pablasso]

I have a faulty router that just this morning rebooted itself several times while Lion was downloading. Everytime the connection was lost it just resumed.

Why don't you try leaving it some hours and see how it goes?

[unwantedLetters]

To be very honest, I have a 3G connection with a limit of about 1.25 GB per month. Since I wanted Lion as quick as possible, I downloaded 1 GB of material using the 3G connection (took me a very, very short time - relatively). When I tried to resume the download from the App Store using my normal internet connection it didn't, and I lost about 1GB of stuff.

That's why I posted the earlier message.

In the interest of full disclosure, it was probably because the Mac App Store needed to re-authenticate me (I changed IPs remember), clicking resume resulted in me not being able to start the download, and the App Store just decided that the 1GB downloaded was useless.

The point about flaky internet connections, and "chunk"ed downloads still stands. I don't expect to be able to get through this download, and even my current issue would have been more gracefully handled with a smaller download size since only 1 chunk of data would have been lost.

Note: Interestingly, my 3G connection is more reliable than my broadband with respect to reliability. Even more interestingly, the provider is the same in both cases.

[w1ntermute]

> Even more interestingly, the provider is the same in both cases.

The wired and wireless divisions of telecoms are often managed very differently. For example, AT&T's U-Verse FTTH service is great, but I wouldn't touch AT&T's cellular service with a 10' pole.

[greengarstudios]

What's your broadband? FTTH? DSL? Cable?

I'm in Vietnam, and we're able to download Lion over FTTH.

[w1ntermute]

Well, India's the exception, not the rule, when it comes to exceedingly poor infrastructure. And considering Apple's upscale target demographic, India probably isn't a huge concern for them.

[unwantedLetters]

Is there some other reason why you think the idea I suggested is incorrect, or not worth it? Because it seems to me that claims like India "isn't a huge concern" might hold some water, but I've read of people complaining of flaky connections even in countries with better infrastructure. Does Apple really want to waste bandwidth on re-uploading data that has already been uploaded? Lion isn't the only multi-gigabyte application available for download on the Mac App Store.

[w1ntermute]

I can only comment on America and Japan, but I'm fairly sure that if it were that simple to implement resumable downloads, Apple would have already done so. Who knows - maybe they already have. After all, you admitted to actually restarting the download from a different IP, which means that the issue may be something completely different.

[sharninder]

I'm in India too and have a 1Mbps connection and downloaded Lion overnight yesterday. MTNL isn't known to be very stable but the Lion install was there in my applications folder in the morning so it does support resuming.

That said, Apple suggested they'll let users download Lion at Apple stores and since this is India we always can do some "jugaad". Why not try talking to the friendly guys at your neighborhood Apple store and they'll install Lion for you.

[dimmuborgir]

Which service provider is that? I use Airtel and I've never experienced the dropping of connection in the last 5 years. Airtel is very reliable and fast too.

[chaitanya]

FWIW, I have found that Airtel's DSL is quite reliable (and fast).

[skeletonjelly]

Can you not find a less than legit copy and put in your key? I'm unfamiliar with the process by any standard.

[astrange]

There is no serial or copy protection on Mac OS X.