Wondering if it's just me... for quite some time steam download speeds have been quite erratic, downloads will peak at 1-1.5mb/sec which is lovely, but then drop to zero several seconds later, download speed graphs ending up looking a bit like a waveform as the speeds always change, with the connection idle more often than it's active. I had always just assumed it was the servers being busy, but this week i'm house-sitting for a friend whilst they're on holiday. steam here maxes their broadband constantly, to the effect that their 6mb ADSL is more than twice as fast as my 20mb cable at home when downloading from steam. anyone else had similar issues?
Steam always maxes my VM connection until i hit the cap then it hits the new capped max but it also hits me with a stupidly high ping meaning online gaming is impossible.
I've noticed Virgin Media is very erratic. Although I never have high pings in online games, in fact it was so low in some CS:S games I got banned as people thought I was cheating lol.
Virgin Media home-broadband (i.e. non-cable) is fine for me, I've not suffered any capping problems with it, but they are famous for their bluntness in using caps. IIRC there's an entire page on their website dedicated to how much they'll cap you for using too much bandwidth. Is it just Steam? I mean, how are your download speeds from other locations?
It seems absolutely fine on everything else, i can easily max it out to the full 2MB/sec download speeds on other sites. xbox live downloads seem unaffected (both the xbox and the PC GFWL version) It's not the capping either, i'm well aware of it (kicks in too often with me + my brother abusing it ) but steam behaves the same way even on days where the connection has been idle all day.
Well, the only thing on Google that relates to the possibility of Virgin slowing down Steam is this thread, so it doesn't seem to be a wide-spread thing. Do you have access to any other net connections with your computer (neighbour's WiFi for instance...)? It might be something to do with Steam itself. If it does the same thing on a different connection, it's a problem with your copy of the program. Maybe it's download location is full, or you've run out of space on your harddrive (although you'd probably have noticed this already)
I also get the same on VM - before and after my upgrade to 20mbit. Although I've noticed that it's been very erratic when browsing recently; one page will load instantly, yet another will take ages (regardless of whether it's cached). For the most part Steam is ok, but it never seems to hit the full download speed. FYI, VM's traffic management policy for cable can be found here: http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html
I think it's more a case of their service sucking, depending on where you live, rather than traffic management. E.G., I live in an area heavily populated by students - my speeds over the summer have been blistering, but now that term is starting again, my speeds are starting to suffer a little. AFAIK, VM don't "throttle" or shape any specific type of traffic or content (at least not in a transparent fashion - there have been reports of them buying gear associated with traffic shaping...), but just limit your speeds once you hit a certain download/upload limit - for any kind of content.
I've had this regularly on my Virgin 20MB XL with Steam. Sometimes it will get close to 2MB/sec other times I'll be lucky to get over 100KB/sec. There doesn't seem to be any reason for it and we get the same here in our lab too sometimes on Steam. One thing you can try although it made no difference to me is to delete the clientreigstry.blob file in your Steam install folder.
