sean I think you missunderstand him.

This sounds like the yenc versus uuencode arguament to me. But is also
applicable to any text v zipped situation

The point being people assume that zipping a file "increases bandwidth"
allowing data to be transmitted faster because the file is smaller.
This was the misconception that gave rise to "yenc" in the first place.

In fact you can't "increase bandwidth" The amount of bandwidth you have
is what you have - end of story - unless you change hardware. Compression
technology can only produce a given compression (The science topic to
read is information theory for why... in other words it explains why
zipping a zip tends towards larger not smaller files)

So a broadband modem capable of transfering data at say 1 mbyte per
second (as an example) will not transfer 2Mbytes in the same second even
if you compress it in a zip file. The transfer time will be the same.

The reason is - all modems including broadband modems provide the best
bandwidth their hardware is capable of - and they do so using compression
on the fly. That bandwidth is fixed -the term bandwidth is seldom used
correctly.

When a zip file or a text file is presented to the modem it will decide
on the fly how to compress the data for the maximum throughput - and the
recieving modem on the other end will uncompress it on the fly.

This means using zip rar or yenc for that matter is a pointless waste of
time if your ONLY consideration is modem transfer speed.

If you want to keep program files together - then do use zip/rar.

You can of course choose to turn off the modem compression but its a bit
stupid as the compression used in modems is targetted directly at getting
the best possible compression for the transfer to achieve the
manufacturers quoted bandwidth capability - where as say zip is more
interested in compressing "files".