topic terrible d/l speeds from Steam on Fibre help please in Gaming

terrible d/l speeds from Steam on Fibre help please

hemlok666 — Sun, 03 Apr 2016 09:02:02 GMT

Hi everyone,
I am new to fibre not the internet, but i am getting awfully slow downloads from Steam, my wifi test shows that i am getting 25mb+ at my tower but my actual max speed clocked through Steam is 2.4mb ?! if anyone has any helpful suggestions please fire away. I have checekd my steam settings and they are set for no limit and the router seems to be fully open if you will.
Many thanks in advance for any help you can offer
take care
H

Re: terrible d/l speeds from Steam on Fibre help please

St3 — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 13:15:39 GMT

Hello there Have u checked your steam settings, check you have downloads restrictions turned off, it should be set too no limit. This could be the problem ?

Re: terrible d/l speeds from Steam on Fibre help please

Porkmeister — Sun, 10 Apr 2016 15:48:44 GMT

Please dont confuse Mb with mb my fibre "download" is 37mb but on steam its 4.5Mb (hope i havent got it the wrong way round 😉 )

Re: terrible d/l speeds from Steam on Fibre help please

twocvbloke — Sun, 10 Apr 2016 20:07:42 GMT

@Porkmeister wrote:

Please dont confuse Mb with mb

Correction - It is MB and Mb (the capital letters are important), the former is Megabytes, the latter Megabits. 1 Megabyte equates to 8 Megabits, therefore to download 1 Megabyte in one second, it requires an 8 Megabit connection.

Downloads in Steam are usually quoted in Megabytes per second, labelled as MB/s or MBps, whereas the connection speed is Megabits per second, Mb/s or Mbps, if steam is reporting 2.4MB/s then that's almost maxing out your connection (3.125MB/s), presumably with some networking losses along the way or with other traffic consuming bandwidth, it's still a very good speed compared to ADSL where you'd never attain even 1MB/s unless it was a really good day.

Re: terrible d/l speeds from Steam on Fibre help please

tokey — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 10:57:51 GMT

Blame marketing for this one. ISPs like to quote higher numbers so broadband or fibre is always measured in megabits whereas all the actual downloads you will see when using the internet are measured in megabytes.

Easiest way to workout your 'real' download speed is to run your favourite speed test online (such as www.speedtest.net) and then divide the answer by 8 (as there are 8 bits in a byte).

Example:

speed test result 80mbps

80 / 8 = 10

real download speed will be 10 megabytes per second

Re: terrible d/l speeds from Steam on Fibre help please

hemlok666 — Thu, 05 May 2016 09:53:50 GMT

Thanks for the replies chaps, its greatly appreciated, i ended up back on the phone again today same problem, but as you very kindly pointed out about 'actual' speeds it makes sense now, ah well silly me for thinking that with unlimited fibre i would be getting double figure downloads

Re: terrible d/l speeds from Steam on Fibre help please

tokey — Thu, 05 May 2016 14:37:58 GMT

It is confusing @hemlok666 and ISPs only have themselves to blame when people are disappointed with the speeds they get as not everyone understands the differences between bits and bytes.

Quite why they cant just measure it in bytes which is how it would normally be presented when using the internet ill never know. Its very poor expectation management.

Re: terrible d/l speeds from Steam on Fibre help please

twocvbloke — Thu, 05 May 2016 16:43:10 GMT

@hemlok666 wrote:

ah well silly me for thinking that with unlimited fibre i would be getting double figure downloads

"Unlimited" means you don't have a data limit, so you can download 1 Megabyte or 5000 Gigabytes in a month without paying extra, you're still limited by the speed at which you can download though which is limited to what the hardware from your computer all the way to the connection point of the internet backbone can do, you have to think of it like a pipe, a wider pipe allows more through that a narrow pipe, so ADSL would be a garden hose, and FTTC is like a fire hose (and dialup is like those thin little red straws you get on them plastic cup drinks)...

Re: terrible d/l speeds from Steam on Fibre help please

hemlok666 — Thu, 05 May 2016 16:59:12 GMT

Thanks again for the replies, twocvbloke sorry my post was a worded that way, I understand about limited unlimited etc it was meant more at the 'fibre' part, and me assuming that it would considerably speed up my downloads on platforms like steam and battle.net