Internet Speeds vs. Download Speeds?

[Catastrophe803]

To begin, yes I know my title is a little vague or confusion, but I myself am a little confused about what's going on.

For starters, I've noticed for a while now that my internet speeds are anywhere from 2x to 5x the rate of my download speeds, and yes I'm aware of the difference between MBps(Megabytes) and Mbps(Megabits). My advertised internet speeds are 1G down and 1G up symmetrical, and in most speedtest-like websites, I am hitting close to the mark, as shown here. Fast.com also shows about that much in download speeds, however there are a few sites that are half that. However, when I am actively downloading files and programs, this is likely what I see:

and

Before I go up my ISP's ass for this, is there anything I could be missing with my own computer? I mean I've seen others download speeds on programs such as Steam and theirs are leagues ahead of mine, even though we would have similar advertised speeds on sites such as Ookla and stuff.

Thanks all.

 

[cryoburner]

It's possible that the download client's performance could be limited by the speed at which your computer can extract and store the data that it's downloading. I'm not sure about Blizzard's utility, but I know Steam transfers compressed data to reduce bandwidth, so speeds can potentially be slower than when downloading a file that's not being decompressed on the fly. It could also depend on the load on the server you are downloading from. My Internet service isn't that fast though, so I'm not sure how likely you are to run into those kinds of performance limits with gigabit Internet.

 

[bill001g]

Speedtest is actually a file download and upload. Your router/modem network does not know the difference between the dummy files that speedtest uses and real file downloads.

In could the be client downloader but pretty much the main difference is the port number it runs on. Then again many downloads actually run over the browser like speedtest.

Many times it is the server that is causing the issue. Many times there are artificial limits placed to avoid people like you who have huge internet connection from hogging the bandwidth of the server. Unlike a speedtest that runs for a few seconds and downloads relatively small amounts of data game download can be many many gigabytes. Even on servers that do not put fixed limits on the download you are still competing with everyone else for a fixed amount of capacity.

Pretty much anyone that has a internet connection over 100mbps has found this issue. It may sound really good that you have 1gbit up and down but that also means the far end need at least that much bandwidth it can dedicate to you.

The only way you can actually use these fast internet connections is torrent. Unfortunately torrent is mostly used for illegal file trading so some ISP try to block it. You can find some game images on the torrents that are completely legal since you can not play without some kind of account. But it seldom is worth the hassle to save a couple minutes or maybe half a hour of download time.