Steam Download Speeds Throttling?

DeliveryGodNoah

Commendable
Dec 13, 2016
26
0
1,530
I have a couple issues with how my internet is behaving.

For one, sometimes when I download a game, it will start out at decently high speeds, at about 20 MB/s, and monitoring through Steam, I see that it suddenly stops, and then instantly drops to 3 MB/s.

Not only that, but my brother, in the same house, on the same network, both of us using wired connections, gets much faster downloads than I do. Neither of us have any special LAN connectors other than what our motherboards came with. I'm not sure how he seems to get an advantage.
 
Solution
I can think of no logical reason your brother should have a faster connection unless you setup STEAM to throttle the download speed on your computer.

http://beta.speedtest.net/

(MS STORE in W10 has a great APP to pin to the Start Menu. It's free, and just shows an icon like the circle shown. Handy)

Run the test more than once on both computers just to confirm your download speed (Mbps is 8x higher than MBps, so if it says 3MBps it should be 24Mbps)

Often a speed like "20MBps" is an incorrect reporting after which the data averages out properly showing the actual value. Same thing often happens just copying files locally.

Questions:
1. What do you both get for SPEEDTEST (run at least 3x each at separate times with no download...
I can think of no logical reason your brother should have a faster connection unless you setup STEAM to throttle the download speed on your computer.

http://beta.speedtest.net/

(MS STORE in W10 has a great APP to pin to the Start Menu. It's free, and just shows an icon like the circle shown. Handy)

Run the test more than once on both computers just to confirm your download speed (Mbps is 8x higher than MBps, so if it says 3MBps it should be 24Mbps)

Often a speed like "20MBps" is an incorrect reporting after which the data averages out properly showing the actual value. Same thing often happens just copying files locally.

Questions:
1. What do you both get for SPEEDTEST (run at least 3x each at separate times with no download running... see Task manager to look at network traffic.. should be less than say 100KBps)

2. what is your best, sustained download through STEAM

3. what is your best, sustained download anywhere else (should be same or close to the SPEED TEST result)

4. Note that STEAM will vary based on the day and time.
 
Solution
I'm not sure if a bad ethernet cable can be worked around (in handshaking) via limiting the bandwidth but if you get really stumped try swapping Ethernet cables.

I'd also swap around the ROUTER connection, though don't bother if your SPEEDTEST results both show you connect to the INTERNET at the same speed (which should be up to the ISP provider cap, so apparently well above 3MBps).