Steam - Average Download Speed?

Games
21

Okay, the results are in and Pogo is correct (I was reading it wrong).

I finished the download of Darksiders last night, and it was running between 450 and 500 Kb/s for most of the download. That’s big “K” as in kilobytes, not little “k” as in kilobits per second. My mistake was in thinking Steam was reporting my download speed to me, they are not, they are reporting the amount of information being downloaded. There is a difference.

My ISP (Fuse.net) is supposed to allow me 5Mbps download speeds. Of course I’ve never actually seen a full 5Mbps, usually I average around 4.25Mbps to nearby loactions and much of the East Coast, and a slower 2.5-3.0 Mbps when connecting to West Coast or other points further away from me. Since I have Steam configured for the Columbus, OH server I am most likely getting a 4.25 Mbps connection to them. I did try changing Steam to a few other nearby locations (Chicago, Atlanta, even NY and NJ), but all were slower than Columbus.

So, given my estimated 4.25Mbps connection, I am downloading 4,250,000 bits per second from Steam. Now we have to convert these data transfer speed numbers into actual data rate numbers. Since there are 8 bits in a byte, I can assume I’m downloading at the rate of 531,250 bytes per second, which we will round to a nice even 500 kilobytes per second. So, every 2 seconds I download 1MB, or 30MB every minute. Darksiders is a 10GB game, so it’s going to take me around 333 minutes to download that 10GB at 30MB per minute. So, 5.5 hours all told. Ugh.

It actually took a little over 6 hours total for me to receive that 10GB because I noticed that the data transfer rate would occasionally dip down into the 300KB per second range for extended periods of time. I assume Steam’s servers were splitting load and bandwidth when that happened.

In any event, Steam seems to be operating at the correct speed level for my internet connection speed as tested. I wish I got the full 5Mbps my ISP claims I should have, but that’s not Steam’s problem. You folks like Robert Sharp who see data transfer rates of 1MB or more per second are probably using cable or fiber with a connection speed of 10Mbps or greater. A pure 10Mbps connection speed would yeild a data transfer rate of 1.25MB per second. Unfortunately fiber is not yet available in my area (my ISP is working on rolling it out) and the cable company (Time Warner) that offers a supposedly faster connection in my area is notorious for overloading their lines and only delivering a fraction of the speed they promise during peak hours. So it looks like for now I’ll need to suffer through overnight installs of large Steam-based games.

Thanks to everyone for the input. Oh, and I hate you people with 10Mbps or better, you know who you are! ;-)

22

It’s actually the B that is supposed to change in size. B = byte, b = bit.

I’m not sure when people started changing the k to lower case in front of the B for KBytes/s (I tend to see a lot of people do kB/s to represent that instead of KB for some reason as of late).

Steam maxes out my 3Mbps connection with Telus here in Vancouver.

23

It is not odd at all that people use the small k instead of the big one. It isn’t as if there are official standards that people actually follow.

According to the standards, it should be KiB for 1024 bytes and kB for a thousand.
And a GB is a billion bytes, not 1073741824. You’d need to use GiB to represent that.

But as I said, everyone ignores the standards and uses the meaning it finds handy.
Windows uses KB for 1024 bytes, and GB for 1073741824 bytes.
Hard drive manufactures use GB for a round billion bytes. Memory manufacturers use it to represent 1073741824 bytes, just like windows does.
Linux generally follows the standards, and uses the official GiB prefix to denote 1073741824 bytes.
Gbit ethernet transfers a normal billion bits per second, not 1073741824.

So, considering what a confusing mess it is, it is not surprising in the slightest that people use kB to represent 1024 bytes instead of a 1000, instead of the proper KiB.