Maybe it's because you don't pay 60$ for playstation live. The love of money... roots ...bananas... all evil?

Hmm, interesting.  For grins and giggles I decided to download the Killzone 2 demo (I don't have access to the KZ3 demo I guess) to see what my download speed was. 

It took me just over 29 minutes to download the 1027MB demo so I was downloading at about 690Kb/sec which is faster than I expected but still much slower than it should be (should be greater than 900Kb/sec).  It took me another 2 1/2 minutes to install the demo for a total of about 30 1/2 minutes to download and install the 1027MB demo.

While that's much better than I expected, now I'm really confused why to download and install a patch for a game or firmware it takes me nearly as long to download and install a gig demo (about 15-20 minutes).

Oh I'm sorry am I raining your completely PS driven forums. I have recently signed up, but I have come here for a long time and all I ever see is an overabundance of threads trashing 360. I am sorry PSN's online service is inferior, it just so happens this was the way PS wanted to do it. PSN has had an ongoing issue with slow updates, unstable servers, and ridiculously long load times. These are just facts, sorry if you felt my comment was trash, I hope this was more informative for you.

Weird. I live in Canada and never have that problem and my ps3 is connected through wifi. Firmware updates are usually done in a few minutes, most of the time spend is installing it.

Demos download just as fast on the ps3 as the 360, but on the ps3 it still needs to install them after downloading. (please fix this next gen)

Maybe you live far away from the server or there aren't many servers in your area for a lot of people?

It's you. I dl'd a 90mb KZ2 patch recently in around 7 mins.

I cant say i have ever had this problem :/

5 hrs for 50mb, hm, something is wrong with your PS3 or your connection could be the problem.
i only have a 7mbps broadband using Qwest cause my phone service was Qwest.
also i use wireless cause i have both PS3 and X360 and my X360 was the 60gb pro so it has no wifi so i always use the Ethernet for my X360 while using wifi for my PS3.
my X360 download things and demo faster, but 50mb patch, it only took me like 5 to 7 mins on PS3 even using wifi.

if you have that problem, its either your connection problem.

Im having this problem also, It seems such a task on buying a new game or the patchings and updates only to have to sit through the loading  for 30 (plus)minutes....Maybe I would play the console more if it wouldnt do that

Yesterday went around friends house, we got tired of Zombies and as a joke I suggested playing some Modnation racers, boy did I regret that decision half an hour later. We had to sit through 6 patches, all of which added up to about 1.8-2GB, his internet is extremely fast, I am talking about 20MB at least as it takes him about 5-10 minutes at max to download 1GB demo on 360. We got to the point where we were betting how big the next patch was going to be!

This is interesting, I have a pretty decent connection (about 20MB down) and I ALWAYS leave my PS3 alone for a while when downloading/updating anything, because of the time.  It doesn't take hours for sure, but easily 20 to 30 minutes; in general I would side with the op here and say it takes way longer than it should (IMO).  I wonder what's causing this?

For general information, I usually have NO problems playing online with my PC, 360 or PS3 and have no real slow-down in downloads on my PC or 360.  IT is just downloads from the Playstation Store or Updates that are slower in my experience. 

Edit: Just went to speedtest to check my connection, and I'm showing 24.83 Mb/s.  Says I should download an 800Mb movie in 4 minutes.