Fastest way to read from an url?

Hi I got following problem: I have to open an url (with PHP of course) and read it's content into a variable. The URL contains binary data from about 1MB to 5MB. Wenn I open the URL with the Browser (with "save link to disk") I get an approximatly speed of 1MB/s (it's on an intranet) but doing the same with PHP, PHP only reaches speeds about 200KB/s. I use following construct: $filecontent = ""; if (!$fc = fopen('http://remotehost/'.$filepath,'b')){ trigger_error("fopen failed on ".'http://remotehost/'.$filepath, E_USER_ERROR); } while (!feof ($fc)) { $buffer = fread($fc, $chunk_size); $filecontent .= $buffer; } fclose ($fc); $chunk_size is set to 16*1024 (=>16Kb) I experimented a bit with the chunksize and at this size it seems to be at its fastest, but still 5 times slower than it should be possible. How can I gain max. speed? TIA & best regards Stefan Rusterholz