Hi WMLI,
BT download rate varies and highly depends on your internet connection speed as well as other peer's connection speed. If there are not many peers/seeds out there, or if they are all slow, your download speed won't go any faster. If you are downloading from a healthy network, but your own connection is slow, there's again nothing much you can do.
Can you provide some more information?
1. What Bit Torrent client and version are you using?
2. What speed are you getting now when you BT?
3. What broadband are you using? Cable/DSL/FiberOptics/T1/...etc?
4. Do you know the download/upload speed of your internet connection? If not, you may find out at
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
5. Where are you located?
5. What is your computer configuration? CPU, RAM, OS
Thanks.