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I have done multiple online internet speed tests, including ookla, and all have said that my internet has a download speed of around 15Mb/s.

I am an avid PC gamer, and when I download games off of both Steam and Origin, they download at a mere 600Kb/s, meaning it can take an 8Gb game a day to download. My friends can download the same games much faster (a couple of hours or so) and they do not have fibre and live much more rurally than me. Why are they so low compared to 15Mb/s?

My supplier is BT (with the hub 5.0 I think) and we don't have fibre.

Thanks :)

adam
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  • You're talking about "an 8Gb game"... file sizes are never measured in bits, so I assume that you're confusing bit units and Byte units here? If Steam shows 600 **Kb/s** that's _really_ slow, but if it shows 600 **KB/s** then that equals ~5 Mb/s, which is around ⅓ your promised speed? – u1686_grawity Feb 29 '16 at 06:32
  • Non commercial Internet speeds are not guaranteed by anyone, only commercial internet is, which most cannot afford. – Moab Feb 29 '16 at 21:50

2 Answers2

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Having fast internet speed is completely different to downloading a file from the internet.

Your internet speed is only the speed between your house and your internet provider (ISP).

But when you download a file, the route goes much further, see below:
House > your ISP > ISP of opposite side > Server

The first question is, how fast is your internet speed really? By doing a speedtest as you did, you follow the same route, where the ISP of the opposite side and their server are where the speedtest takes place. These are usually high end servers and their network are also high capacity networks designed to measure your network speed and thus allowing you a really fast speed.

There is a rule of thumb though, the further the server is away, the longer the route becomes. Data is chunked into several sections, and each section is sent over the internet in a separate package. It is possible for one packet to become lost or delayed which means that your transfer will be slowed down.

This could be the case with steam, as the server might be far away from you. Steam has many servers and you can connect to a different one, increasing the chance of a fast download.

It is also possible that the steam server itself just doesn't have the capacity to handle your download, or they slowed down to give other downloads more priority (most likely the case)

It is even possible with steam, that on one download location, the server gives priority to a certain download, while on another download location, they don't. My suggestion therefor would be to first try and change to a different download location. I've had weird results choosing a different download location, one that was even further away, got me a huge download speed increase.

LPChip
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It could be because of any one or more of a number of reasons including -

  1. An oversubscribed DSLAM (or equivalent ) - ie too many people sharing the connection between the far end of the DSL router/ switch and the ISP.

  2. A congested pipes between the world and the ISP.

  3. Being lumped into a bandwidth pool/qos with other heavy users (often unlimited and business accounts are different and get different performance because of the way bandwidth is shared)

  4. If you are connecting via wireless, your WIFI connection might be bad (noisy channel, distance). Does the problem persist if you plug in a network cable ?

davidgo
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  • 1. My WiFi is always that slow no matter how many people are using it. (It does however go up to 800kb/s occasionally though). 2. It is not any faster the closer I am to the router, however if I use Ethernet then it does go up to about 900kb/s. – adam Feb 28 '16 at 23:06
  • In that case, I postulate that the ISP is oversubscribed (No one can really do better then this without intense testing or support of the ISP). I postulate this is the case because your WIFI connection will have higher latency and maybe slightly more packet loss then your cable connection, and you are getting correspondingly lower performance. Something to check to confirm this hypothesis is if speeds vary greatly by time of day, and then see what they correlate to if they do. Also, what happens if you do lots of downloads simultaneously - do you get more overall throughput ? – davidgo Feb 28 '16 at 23:12
  • I never really try multiple downloads at the same time and have not got my PC up to try it now :( – adam Feb 28 '16 at 23:14