I just recently started to delve into the Playstation Store while my 360 account is locked while they investigate unauthorized access.  Anyway, I thought, "Hey, the Mortal Kombat demo is out, I'll get that.  520MB, sweet!  20 minutes from now I'll be ripping dudes in half!  :D"  Start the DL and it says, "120 minutes left."  Okay,maybe it's just measuring the startup download rate."  5 minutes later it tells me "140 minutes left."  No worries, I'll just go download a much smaller demo, like Trash Panic.  I've always wanted to play that and it's only 200 MB.  "210 minutes left: 10% complete"  -_-  That coupled with the fact that background downloading isn't just activated by default is totally killing my desire to do anything downloadable on PS3.
 
I don't know if this is a widespread thing or not or if there are any ways to speed up downloads to tolerable levels.  Any advice?

I have a 15 mb/s download and neeeeeever have had the ps3 download speed issues that I hear some people speak of. I have never waited more than 20 minutes for ANY download on the PS3.

A wired connection should help. 

" Socom 4 beta will make you want to kill yourself if you DL it. "

I have a 12MB/sec connection.
 
I do use wireless, so I suppose that's the problem.  Do it only because My roommates wouldn't appreciate ethernet cables running down the hall.  Ah, the plight of apartment only being outfitted with one cable port.  Guess I'll just have to deal with it.

is your connection optimized? you should put your PS3 on DMZ and optimize your DNS servers using DNS benchmarker :) Heck here in the Philippines I only have 1mbps wired and my downloads arent as bad as that lol