I have Cingular (now AT&T Wireless, again) as my cell phone provider.  I get the unlimited internet because I'm a geek and must have email wherever I go, for some reason.

Today I was attempting to download a large file to my phone (approximately 25 MB) and I kept getting the very uninformative "The page cannot be displayed" error every time.  Small files downloaded fine.  Anything over a few MB would crap out (after hanging for a few minutes).

Was it Pocket IE?  I mean I know it's not the best browser on the planet, but why would it restrict download size if your device has a couple gigs of storage available?  So I tried other browsers, such as Opera Mini.  Opera Mini defers to IE for downloads since it uses a proxy server to display content quickly.  The last thing they want to do is proxy a large file download.  I tried Minimo, but it wouldn't even install.  And I heard they aren't developing it anymore (thanks, Mozilla).  All the others cost money, which I don't want to spend to download only one single file.

Then I remembered that AT&T configures you to go through their own proxy server so they can feed you the completely useless MediaNET content by typing in normally non-existent top level domains (ends in .cingular, if i recall).  So I went into the connection properties, advanced, then onto proxy settings for the MediaNET connection.  I cleared "use a proxy for this connection" and voila!  I could download large files now!  And, strangely enough, the ping time seemed to be much better.  I figured the proxy server would be higher performance (since Edge is technically only marginally better than 56k modems) because they might be caching requests and reducing image sizes and everything else proxies can do, but I guess not.  I guess it was only for the completely useless Media.Net.  Without the proxy, my speed definitely is better than it was before.

P.S. If you like Media.NET, I apologize.  I find the service completely useless, as you can tell.  :-)