Attempts to speed up initial Netboot.me download rate

I've written that the biggest drawback for me regarding Netboot.me is the very slow download rate (10-15 kB/s on my EeePC 901).
A thread I started touched on this topic and resulted in an option which seems an area worth pursuing in this respect(see posts 5 and 8 here).
However, up to now, it hasn't given me the results I was looking for.
My earlier attempts are detailed in the same thread (see post 10).
I've done a bit more since then and everything up to now is summarized here:
1. Downloaded the source code, altered line 290 to read 16384 bits, saved and then ran make as user. No errors. Ran cat bin/gpxe.usb > /dev/sdc to put gxpe.usb on USB key. Booted with this as normal. However, although it booted as usual, no IP showed up when booting to the USB key and it very quickly moved to a frozen menu type menu from which I could only exit by hitting the power button. In this test, I used a small 128 MB key
2. Did the same as above but using a brand new USB key of 2 GB size and this time I ran make as root. The very same result though.
3. More or less the same again with the same 2 GB key. This time instead of cat, to get gpxe.usb on the key, I ran dd if=gpxe.usb of=/dv/sdc
However, same result as before.

Interestingly gpxe.usb and netbootme.usb have more or less the same size (275 kB) but they are very clearly not the same. From searching through all files, certainly no netbootme.usb is produced by the compile.
I really need some help on this so let's see what turns up on the forum.