jigdo newbie question

[Richard Lyons <richard@the-place.net>]

I need a complete etch dvd set for a location that has no inet.  I keep
hearing about bittorrent and jigdo, so I thought I'd try.  Bittorrent
wouldn't connect to something; after it had failed for over half an hour, I
concluded it wasn't going anywhere and switched to jigdo.  I started a
download of debian-testing-i386-binary-1.jigdo from a debian mirror here in
UK.  It downloaded stuff - as far as I could see in batches of ten files -
for about four hours, then said 
    Aaargh - 288 files could not be downloaded. This should not
    happen! Depending on the problem, it may help to retry downloading
    the missing files.
and a lot of other stuff too.  Restarting with either the same or different
mirrors gives the same result. The error also suggests
    As a last resort, you could try to complete the CD image download
    by fetching the remaining data with rsync.
but that sounds a tiresome proceedure. I looked at the directory listings 
on the mirror, and they haven't just changed to a new build -- the same
files are still there.

My questions to all you jigdo-familiars are
  - Is this a common problem?
  - Perhaps there is an easy solution?
  - What is the advantage of jigdo?  As far as I can see it downloads at
  pretty much a normal speed, using a single connection to a single mirror.
  It's true I was getting a stupidly slow download the old fashioned way
  last night (I left it running overnight and only got 1GB of the dvd iso
  image after more than 8 hours), but I expect that was just a busy server.

TIA

-- 
richard