The apt-fast script I have created is a little shellscript that increases the speed of apt-get by many times. You need to have the axel download accelerator installed, which is a simple, short process, but everything else is extremely straight forward. I started out downloading the upgrades for Kubuntu, at 32kb/s. Not terrible, but not that great. When I was done with the script here, I was getting up to ~850kb/s. That is great, huh?

via Matt Parnell’s Brain: Plugged In! | apt-fast and Axel: Roughly 26x Faster apt-get Installations and Upgrades.

EDIT: you can also do this in Centos / Fedora with yum