Steam

[Kosigan]

It's not steam OP. I get a constant 2.5-2.8MB/sec via steam. I live in TX, so I may be more favorably positioned to steam servers than the southern hemisphere is, especially Australia which I know has some iffy internet to begin with (or so I've heard).

 

[Damo]

Steam handles well for me too, so can't really complain.

I always get between 1.5MB/sec and 2.2MB/sec which isn't bad considering I live in the middle of the English countryside.

If you don't like Steam now, you should have seen it when it was first launched - it's improved a hell of a lot over the last 5 years and has become a real asset imo.

 

[PsYcH0_Ch!cKeN]

Hooray for lots of opinion and misinformation (with a scattering of useful tips lost amongst the white noise)!

@Grandad1953, who's your ISP? I've had on and off issues in the last two months with Steam selecting extremely poor content servers in the US (I'm in Brisbane) and I would have considered 256K/s to be fast compared to what I was getting. Setting the region and preferred content server is more of a guide for Steam and less a rule, especially if the content you want is not mirrored on a local server (or at least, a local server with available bandwidth).

However, help is at hand! First, make sure you set your preferred server to an Australian one, doesn't matter which. Second, make sure your connection speed in the Steam settings is set correctly, otherwise Steam will throttle your downloads. Next, download TCPview from Sysinternals here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897437[url]http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897437[/URL]

Start your Steam download and open up TCPview. Scroll down until you find entries for Steam and you'll see every connection that it has open as well as running tallies of the data up/downloaded. If your download is slow, find a Steam connection that clearly has the data totals changing slowly, right click it and choose Close Connection. Steam will automatically open a new connection to a new server. If it's still slow, rinse and repeat. It may take a few goes, but eventually you'll get a content server that's either local or not heavily loaded and away you'll go.

A handy hint is that servers with a 49.143.* IP address are almost always "official" content servers in the US and they tend to be overloaded to buggery. Unless one magically gives you a whole lot of bandwidth to play with, I'd avoid them if possible. Just be aware that if you're ever downloading an old or obscure title, or a brand new one, no local servers may have mirrors of the files, so you might end up being stuck pulling the data from overseas no matter what. If that happens, you can try setting a different country for your download location (one that isn't the US) and see how you go.

 

[Grandad1953]

most of my fellow clan members are on this speed, they downloaded the last map pack for (dare I say it) Black Ops in 15 - 20 minutes took me 7.5 hours. Most of the time it only downloading at 36Kb/s

 

[Grandad1953]

As I mentioned in my post, there are ways to force Steam to download from Australian content providers who are affiliated with the Australian providers, one way of which is to use the program(s) linked to in that thread. Whether or not that will improve your speed, I'm not sure. As Zips said, it's an ISP issue with some, or for all I know, all, Australian providers capping downloads from Steam servers. You'll have to do some investigating on the subject, it's worth asking your ISP and checking out the Whirlpool forums for example. You may find that it is the reverse of what I am suggesting, that you will have to block the Aussie download servers in order to force it to download from overseas, and get the speed that your connection should have.

To the best of my knowledge there won't be any opportunity to download the game or updates outside of Steam, so if you find that your ISP is inflexible on the matter, or that there isn't a way around it, it looks like you'll either have to take a pass, or wait a bit longer for the initial download (unless you get the DVD) and any updates.

Spoke to a tech at my ISP whom just happens to be 1 of the top 10 players in Battlefield Bad Company, he has the same problem with Steam. He has tested all at the ISP and found it is a Steam problem. He has tried to get it fixed but they (Steam) do nothing.

 

[Grandad1953]

(1) ISP & Steam got together found the problem is with Steam!


(2)1.5 weeks on Steam have been trying to fix the problem. With no success yet. Very slow!!! They seem not to care about you when they are not getting your money!