Best way to upload/download large files?

I’m a little lost here.
A buddy of mine overseas uploaded this video—about 800 MB—using speedyshare.com and sent me the link. It took him roughly two hours to get it up there.
Then I try to pull the file down, and after four hours, I’m barely at the 50% mark.
Yesterday, I tried uploading my own video (around 760 MB) to speedyshare, and that took me about two and a half hours.
How is it even possible that my download speed is sitting at three and a half times slower than my upload?
Is this just a speedyshare thing, or am I missing something obvious?
If it is them, does anyone know of a better site where the upload and download speeds actually make sense?

It's mostly because sites like Speedshare and those other similar services just want to bait you into buying a premium account if you actually want decent speeds. I just tested one file—only about 10 MB—and my upload was sitting at 500 kbps while the download was crawling at 30 kbps.

Maybe just use Dropbox to swap files with each other.

Oh, I see how it is.
So, tell me—which one actually moves faster when you're transferring files? Is Dropbox better than Google Drive, or are we really just splitting hairs here?

It’s the same thing, really, since both will give you the maximum speed you can actually get out of them.