I guess things were different here in Europe. I remember in High School (so... 2002ish? BitTorrent existed but there weren't any big popular trackers yet) We'd download a movie from Kazaa in the computer lab during CAD class and then watch during a long lunch break. Kazaa definitely supported using multiple sources.

Then when I went to Uni there was a large campus DC++ network with internal 100 MBit downloads.