Comment by hectormalot 2 days ago
I have 1Gbit at home, but almost never reach those speeds when downloading games. It’s one of those cases where it makes sense (I want to play now!), but I’m under the impression the limit is upstream (at steam most likely), rather than on my connection. (I do get those speeds on speed tests, doesn’t seem to be my setup).
As I was typing this it came to mind. Will test against one of my own servers one of these days to confirm.
You can try Fast.com (Netflix) or Cloudflare’s one which are explicitly designed to work around this by serving the test data from the same endpoints the serve actual customer data, so ISPs can’t cheat.
This still doesn’t guarantee however that you will achieve this speed to any random host on the internet - their pipe to Cloudflare/Netflix may very well be fat and optimized but it doesn’t guarantee their pipe to a random small hosting provider doesn’t go over a 56k modem somewhere (I jest.. but only a bit).
I get full speed on steam downloads, even set the limit lower so youtube doesn't buffer.
Steam is tricky cause it has multiple potential bottlenecks. The steam cache, internet connection, decompression (i.e. cpu) and storage. Often hard to tell which limit you're hitting