[General Maximus]

because when you download a file from a website you are forming 1 connection to that site/file and using 1 downstream channel to download that 1 file. So the dite itself might be slow/congested and the channel you are using might be congested as well.

When you use torrents you are potentially forming hundreds of connections to different people, using all 5 of your downstream channels sucking up as much speed as they can give you. If one user is only uploading at 5k it dosnt stop someone else like me from uploading at 1mb/sec to you and you are also less likely to see congestion on any one channels as the other 4 channels should make up for it with load balancing. This is why a lot of people favour p2p protocols like torrents and usenet.