Note: This page was originally sourced from our Blogger page: http://ncarrda.blogspot.com/2021/06/403-forbidden-for-slow-connections.html

 If you find yourself receiving 403 forbidden HTTP responses when downloading data from the RDA, it may be the result of a slow connection. 

The RDA currently limits connections that are below 200 KB/s averaged over a two minutes.  If a user stays below this threshold, they will be temporarily blocked from accessing our servers for 30 minutes.

Once blocked, downloaded files may appear to be smaller than expected and contain HTML. This occurs, because the server is sending the RDA's 401 forbidden page instead of the file.

At this point, there are two options to overcome this problem. The first would be to improve your network speed. Often, using a VPN or proxy server can overcome this issue

Alternatively, you can consider using our Globus download option. On each data access page, you can find an option to download the files using Globus as seen in the screenshot below. Globus is a service that transfers files using gridFTP and has built in error tolerance and unsupervised downloads.