Just for grins I turned off the cable modem and used my good old dial-up connection and re-ran the toast.net tests. Here are the results compared to my cable.
Dial-up:
Mars rover - 43K (165 sec)

F-16 jets - 43K (260 sec)

Cable:
Mars rover - 2997K (2.343 sec)

F-16 jets - 3043K (3.672 sec)

That's an average of 70.6 times faster using cable than dial-up.