Comment by bjackman
8 hours ago
Wait, but you get 63MB/s down from steam?
My internet is pretty good, I can easily saturate my (rather dated) WiFi at about 30MB/s. But Steam downloads are extremely slow for me (can't remember the numbers but much less).
I always assumed Valve themselves were just stingy with bandwidth. Something else funny going on?
Peering between your ISP and Valve is likely saturated.
Considering Valve has an incentive to make downloads fast (= more revenue), it's likely your ISP is being stingy in this case.
I would have assumed valve use some third party CDN but yeah this would make sense I guess
And ISPs in most of the western world have no incentives to fix it, instead trying to scam Valve and others to get paid twice.
The business model of consumer ISPs is "take the money and don't deliver" so this tracks.
It might have detected the wrong country/city for you. Check Settings -> Downloads -> Region
Otherwise it's just your WiFi being patchy. I think Steam is doing "friendly" bulk download, it slows down before the connection is saturated, to avoid disconnecting your wife/mum/siblings watching Youtube or on a videoconference.
For me it varies a lot. Sometimes I get 800 Mbit and sometimes like 80 Mbit. Mostly closer to 800, tho.
> Wait, but you get 63MB/s down from steam?
I usually (but not always) saturate my downlink with Steam downloads... even back when I was a Comcast customer and paying for ~180MB/s (~1500mbit/s) asymmetric service.
I believe that I have noticed that smaller games (~a few hundred MB or maybe a GB or two) will download quite a bit slower than large games, but I'm not very confident in that observation.
Comcast has Steam server(s) colocated within their network in my immediate area. I’ve observed that less popular downloads tend to connect to external servers in the next state over.
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