Games download slower than friend with slower internet

[87morpheus]

I recently noticed that my steam downloads are much slower than my friends. I just assumed that they all had faster download speeds than me, but I found out that my friend has 5-10 Mbps and I have about 15 Mbps. So his internet isn't too much slower than mine, but we were downloading the same game (it was about 3 GB). It took him about 5 minutes to finish downloading it and it took me about 40 minutes.

I want to let you know that the download limit is on No Limit and the download region is the one nearest me. This makes absolutely no sense, what am I missing?

 

[rgd1101]

Same ISP? same location?

 

[87morpheus]

No, we live on different parts of the US.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Downloading a 3 GB game at with 15 Mbps connection would take ~27 minutes ideally (assuming you could download consistently at 100% of your rated speed, which is basically never the case). When you say your friend has 5-10 Mbps, what are you basing that off of? Because either his connection is actually much faster than that, or he's lying about downloading a 3 GB game in 5 minutes.

 

[87morpheus]

Perhaps I over exaggerated to myself how long it took him to download it because it felt like it took so long to download, but he definitely downloaded the game much faster than me.

 

[DeadlyDays]

different steam servers, you can go into the steam settings and set what region to use as download servers.

Or maybe your in a congested area and you are only getting a fraction of your rated download speeds due to overloaded local ISP equipment, and your friends neighborhood is in a non-congested area and getting a little more than his rated speeds.

 

[rgd1101]

No, we live on different parts of the US.

Can't really compare if you are not living close.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Again, when you say your friend has 5-10 Mbps, what do you mean? Do you mean his speed varies between 5 and 10 Mbps when he runs speed test? Do you mean he has either a 5 Mbps plan, or a 10 Mbps plan, but you can't remember which? Same goes for you 15 MBps. Just trying to understand where those numbers are coming from.

 

[Gillerer]

3 GB in 5 minutes means an average transfer rate of 82 Mbit/s, which would indicate your friend actually has a 90 - 100 Mbit/s connection (downstream).

You or your friend may be confusing MB/s and Mb/s. The uppercase "B" stands for "byte", lowercase "b" or "bit" stands for "bit". 1 byte = 8 bits. Internet connections are advertised using bits per second, whereas most game launchers and platforms (as well as Speedtest) report speeds in bytes per second.

If your friend actually gets 10 MB/s speeds, that is equal to 80 Mb/s or 80 Mbit/s, and attainable with 90 - 100 Mbit/s connections.

 

[87morpheus]

Again, when you say your friend has 5-10 Mbps, what do you mean? Do you mean his speed varies between 5 and 10 Mbps when he runs speed test? Do you mean he has either a 5 Mbps plan, or a 10 Mbps plan, but you can't remember which? Same goes for you 15 MBps. Just trying to understand where those numbers are coming from.

I'm starting to think he's got better internet than he thinks. I told him what you said and he said that he is only comparing it to what steam tells him as he's downloading a game.

 

[Karadjgne]

Theres many factors to be taken into consideration. Where you live, the exact placement of the hookup, the steam server itself, amount of users on that server, any satellite conditions, even time of day etc. Your local ISP tells you that you have a certain speed, but that's relative to nothing. Comcast tells me that I have 50GB cable internet, its been upgraded from 12GB. Feels the same to me, even DL take the same time, still around 1MB a second. Location is important depending on how far away from the nearest node you are, the further away, the more interruptions there are in-line, the slower your inet. If you have an older house with RG-49 instead of RG-6 cable, it'll be slower, if you have an inline signal amplifier for the cable, it can be slower, if you have signal interference from a badly grounded tv, it'll be slower, if your DL was at prime time cable usage, it'll be slower, if you landed a high usage steam server and your friend landed a pretty open one, youll see slower DL. The things that can slow down a DL are pretty varied.

 

[Gillerer]

I'm starting to think he's got better internet than he thinks. I told him what you said and he said that he is only comparing it to what steam tells him as he's downloading a game.

Reiterating what I said, Steam will report speeds in MB/s whereas connection speeds are advertised in Mbit/s.