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I am with the British ISP Plusnet

I ran the Ofcom speed test which confirmed my speeds are as advertised:

enter image description here

However, when I download in Steam I only get the following (even when unchecking limits on download speeds)

enter image description here

I thought it might be the transfer speed to my harddrive so I tried on my SSD and it is no quicker. What's going on? Am I being throttled?

egg
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    You can change Steam to show download speed in megabits in the [program settings](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zjQqc.png) which will remove the confusion. – Mokubai Jul 02 '20 at 09:30
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    Solely since nobody else has made the explicit point, note also the important distinction between "37.0 Mbps" and "4.6 MB/s": B is bytes, b is bits. Case is important. – MadHatter Jul 05 '20 at 05:56

1 Answers1

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You're confusing megabits and megabytes

Your line is 37 megabits/s Mbps
Your measured download is 4.6 megabytes/s MBps

37mbps = 4.625MBps so you are getting what you pay for.

See https://www.gbmb.org/mbps-to-mbs

Tetsujin
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    ISPs like to sell you megabits because it makes the number bigger. (Also because every other ISP does it) – user253751 Jul 02 '20 at 19:01
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    just for completeness: 8 bits in a byte. bytes to bits multiply by eight; bits to bytes divide by 8 – Yorik Jul 02 '20 at 20:29
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    @user253751 I share your general cynicism, but communication system speeds have always been compared by their Baud rate (symbol rate), which in digital systems is _generally_ [the same thing as their bitrate](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20534417/what-is-the-difference-between-baud-rate-and-bit-rate), and not their "byterate" - that's because the number of binary digits physically sent down the line will be different than the number of meaningful bits and bytes actually sent (e.g. due to low-level frame/packet overhead, error detection codes like Hamming, and channel bonding). – Dai Jul 02 '20 at 22:06
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    @user253751 They sell it like that because that's how networking hardware works. Converting to Megabytes is mostly for convenience of regular people, who don't understand the "bits" part of computers. Same reason Hard Drive manufacturers advertise capacity in powers of 10, even though computers use powers of 2, ie. a 1 Terabyte hard drive will have ~931 GB of capacity. – SnakeDoc Jul 02 '20 at 22:44
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    @Yorik, for networking purposes, I find it useful to divide by ten rather than eight when converting from bits to bytes. It's easier, and accounts for framing, error correction, and other inefficiencies that take up bandwidth, but don't count towards the actual data transferred. – Mark Jul 03 '20 at 02:08
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    @SnakeDoc a 1 Terabyte hard drive will have 1000 GB.. or 931 GiB :) – pipe Jul 04 '20 at 01:45
  • The unit used in the speed test in Mbps (Megabits per second) while the figure shown in Steam is MB/s (Megabytes per second). The conversion between them is 1 Mbps = 0.125 MB/s, the two transfer speeds are actually identical 37 Mbps = 37*0.0125 = 4.6 MB/s More detail: https://bytesconvert.com/blogs/mbps-vs-mbs---internet-speed-mystery – Belive Aug 16 '20 at 07:23