As a follow-up to my last post, I used those
things mostly when creating a new package...
eg, there is no checksum file yet for the package
system to use to verify the download and you
want the most reliable transfer possible so
you can create an accurate checksum file later.

One way to verify the files are OK without a
checksum file is to see if gzip thinks they are
valid.

Also, wget is nice since you also get a visual
indication of what is going on, eg, % download,
which I sometimes do/don't get with ftp.  And it
will retry the transfer under some conditions,
and I think will resume a broken transfer.  Very
handy.

BTW: wget is itself a package: net/wget, and is
about the second thing I install on any NetBSD
system after the lightweight emacs editor which I
maintain: editors/mg2a.  [shameless advertising]