not sure what edonkey calls it, but are you getting lowid? in emule, you can tell if you have a lowid if at the bottom right corner of the screen. if you connect to a server and the lower left arrow is yellow, then you have a lowid. that means you're firewalled either by a hardware firewall (router) or software firewall and need to forward ports.
another key to getting good download transfers is limiting the upload to a more acceptable amount. take 80% of the maximum upload speed and set that as its limit. once your upload reaches about that high, it starts to affect the download speed dramatically.
