Hey
BT Full Fibre 900 Customer - All testing done wired directly to bt hub
Downloading with steam/epic/origin etc (game downloads and similar downloads) will diminish download speeds to 5-6MB/s
Couple examples:
Steam download hovering around 4-6MB/s, turning on VPN, it jumps to anything from 50-100MB/s
Downloading a visual studio update from microsoft sitting at 50-100MB/s, unpausing a download in the epic launcher immediately drops download rate on both apps to the same 4-6MB/s. Hitting pause again and visual studio download rate jumps back to normal as if nothing happened. (This behaviour can also be resolved again but turning on a vpn, then both download at the limit of my real internet speed).
I have verified it's not a cpu/ram limitation on the pc, I've a fairly high specc'ed PC and usage on ram/cpu are 20-30% at their highest when testing.
My actual unthrottled speed is anything from ~700-930 verified in many speedtests (note: if I leave a game download in for e.g. Epic downloading at 4-5MB/s and then run a speedtest it gets like 50mb/s instead of the usual 700-900)
For a control:
As prior mentioned, visual studio updates, can hit 90+MB/s
Downloading ubuntu via torrent: 90+ MB/s
This seems like pretty cut and dry evidence that BT is traffic shaping/throttling certain downloads. But from what I've seen BT state they do no such thing.
What's my outcome here, I'm currently having to pay for a vpn to get full use of the internet service I pay for
While we're waiting for one of the experts to assist, may I congratulate you on having the weirdest forum user IDs I have ever come across! 😲
I may have just mashed the keyboard after my go to usernames were taken 😂
Forgive me if I'm wrong but I suspect you had and were paying for a VPN anyway just like I have.
Check your settings in Steam because by default, it's Steam that throttles downloads according to a quick Google search.
Steam settings uncapped, same for origin/epic. Even if it was on however, it wouldn't explain the drop in overall Internet performance, or atleast to this extent
Used a friend's vpn login to try it out after they mentioned trying it, now I have my own subscription
Does anyone else have this behaviour?
No problems at all. I can confirm I get full unthrottled speeds in steam/Epic/Rockstar/Battlenet etc on Fibre 500. Even yesterday there was a 57GB update for Cold war and that finished in no time in the background while I was browsing. No VPN was used.
Well I'm stumped then, I'll try some other machines and see if it makes a difference