Can http do downloads from an arbitrary offset to another ? Not a rhetorical question, genuinley curious.

A long long time ago I had written an application (out of a mix of curiosity, whim and as a learning excercise) to share rpm files (red hat package manager) peer to peer. I chose ftp because it could parallelize the download to max out my bandwidth.

Connectivity to the main servers used to be terrible in those days in India. Neither were there local mirrors with fat pipes.