You'll need to give him an account to login with (assuming you don't want anonymous logins) and yes.. you'll have to forward your ports. Unless you are using PassiveFTP (which I would suggest doing) you will have to open up port 20 and 21 for full FTP functionality/connectivity (again, unless you use PASV FTP mode - which, I again suggest using so you don't have to open/forward multiple ports on your firewall).
I looked in router setup
did not see this PASV thing,
is that in the Router (linksys WRT54G) or in the ftp program?
edit: honestly, if you are going to host it off your machine and all you want to do have the user download (ie: he's not going to send you any files), it would probably be easier just to setup a basic web site with anonymous access turned off and a single page with a link to the file you want him to download.
this is what I have awalys done in the past
but my new hoster is so LAME
I used to give out a URL/sub-folder link with nothing in the folder but the target file (ie no index.html) and the surfer would get a file listing and then just download the file
but NOW - I have to actually make a web page with a linked-text to the DL file (yes - only about 5-10 minutes to make, etc, but a pain - nonetheless)
I don't think there will be a significant speed difference - the biggest bottleneck (as has been pointed out) is your upload speed. Not much going to make it any better FTP/TFTP/HTTP/etc.. going across an overseas link will introduce a lot of latency in the transfer as well.
the latency is not an issue - once connected
edit2:
a 800kb/s link equates to ~5.5MB/min transfer rate upload. Which means your 2.7GB file will take over 8 hours to upload in a best case scenario. If you are hosting this on your machine at your place, you need to make sure your link and computer stay up for the entire transfer (Not sure if you are one that shuts off their machines at the end of the day or not)
I predicted 10 hours, and so far - seems to be right on track
I am actually getting 73-75 KB/s on my upload ( for past 3.5 hours)
part of the logic was - if he could fetch right from my computer, he would have the file in 10 hours, but this way, it is 20 hours
(ie 10 for my upload and 10 for his download)
but as that is not critical, I figured - better to have it own my server (vs my home computer), in case others needed it, or he gets an interruption
thanks
ps
as you have all given such good advice
my original question remains -
how much faster is FTP vs HTML DL at a given Bandwidth?
1% 5% 10% ?? just curios