Download speed faster with VPN then without ???

[Leviathen]

Greetings,

 

So yesterday I had a topic asking if anyone knows why my download speed on steam suddenly lowered to 1.2 MB/s, today however out of desperation I tried using my VPN and suddenly my download speed shot up to 25.7 MB/s, now my question is why is that and how do I fix it so that it has the same speed without the VPN ? Because to me with limited knowledge about PC's this doesn't make any sense, I also tried changing the download server before to the same country the VPN is redirecting to and that didn't change the download speed at all, I'm at a loss to be honest... 

 

Thanks in advance

[Hinjima]

6 minutes ago, Leviathen said:

Greetings,

 

So yesterday I had a topic asking if anyone knows why my download speed on steam suddenly lowered to 1.2 MB/s, today however out of desperation I tried using my VPN and suddenly my download speed shot up to 25.7 MB/s, now my question is why is that and how do I fix it so that it has the same speed without the VPN ? Because to me with limited knowledge about PC's this doesn't make any sense, I also tried changing the download server before to the same country the VPN is redirecting to and that didn't change the download speed at all, I'm at a loss to be honest... 

 

Thanks in advance

Under specific circumstances, VPNs can increase speeds for certain services. ISPs sometimes throttle, or artificially slow down, specific types of traffic; for example, several major ISPs have throttled streaming entertainment services like Netflix ++.  1.2 MB/s to 25.7 MB/s is quite the jump though..  Try some internet speed tests and see if the result is similar.

[Supersonicwolfe]

8 minutes ago, Leviathen said:

Greetings,

 

So yesterday I had a topic asking if anyone knows why my download speed on steam suddenly lowered to 1.2 MB/s, today however out of desperation I tried using my VPN and suddenly my download speed shot up to 25.7 MB/s, now my question is why is that and how do I fix it so that it has the same speed without the VPN ? Because to me with limited knowledge about PC's this doesn't make any sense, I also tried changing the download server before to the same country the VPN is redirecting to and that didn't change the download speed at all, I'm at a loss to be honest... 

 

Thanks in advance

Can be your ISP (internet service provider) is throttling your connection (To sell you a more expensive service).

When using a VPN, the ISP won't able to see where the data coming from or it's purpose.

 

The only thing I have in mind is try manually set DNS server to a 3rd party like Google or Cloudflare.

[Leviathen]

1 minute ago, Hinjima said:

Under specific circumstances, VPNs can increase speeds for certain services. ISPs sometimes throttle, or artificially slow down, specific types of traffic; for example, several major ISPs have throttled streaming entertainment services like Netflix ++.  1.2 MB/s to 25.7 MB/s is quite the jump though..  Try some internet speed tests and see if the result is similar.

my internet speed in testing with is actually a bit slower then without the VPN, the problem seems to be specifically only related to steam for some reason, everything else is perfectly fine, it doesn't make any sense, also before yesterday I had the 28 MB/s without the VPN

[Hinjima]

1 minute ago, Leviathen said:

my internet speed in testing with is actually a bit slower then without the VPN, the problem seems to be specifically only related to steam for some reason, everything else is perfectly fine, it doesn't make any sense, also before yesterday I had the 28 MB/s without the VPN

Check your steam settings under download options to see if anything has been implemented to throttle the download.

[Leviathen]

1 minute ago, Hinjima said:

Check your steam settings under download options to see if anything has been implemented to throttle the download.

Everything having anything to do with throttling is complete turned off

[Lurick]

No new programs installed recently on your computer? No LAN software or gamer software?

Sometimes this stuff comes with options designed to speed up gaming and throttle everything else.

[CWALD]

Are you consistently using MB/s or are the 25+ measurements in Mb/s? 1B=8b so 3MB/s=24Mb/s. By default steam measures your speed in MB/s while most internet speed tests use Mb/s. So while a drop to 1.2MB/s would still be a concern, it is a lot more reasonable if your internet speed is normally 25Mb/s and not 200Mb/s.

[Leviathen]

7 minutes ago, Lurick said:

No new programs installed recently on your computer? No LAN software or gamer software?

Sometimes this stuff comes with options designed to speed up gaming and throttle everything else.

Not that I know of no, I think I got a windows update a couple days ago but that's about it, it also lowered mid download, it suddenly dropped to 1.2 from 28MB/s, without doing anything, I was just watching a show on amazon prime when it happened.

[Leviathen]

1 minute ago, CWALD said:

Are you consistently using MB/s or are the 25+ measurements in Mb/s? 1B=8b so 3MB/s=24Mb/s. By default steam measures your speed in MB/s while most internet speed tests use Mb/s. So while a drop to 1.2MB/s would still be a concern, it is a lot more reasonable if your internet speed is normally 25Mb/s and not 200Mb/s.

Yeah I know, it is in fact 28MB/s that I have, 28Mb/s would be horrific for the connection I have, I have about 250 ish Mb/s on average  

[Leviathen]

Just now, oofki said:

Try a different download location 

also tried that before, I tried several different country's all over the world and it's all capped at 1.2MB/s 

[Anvith]

Okay, I've dealt with this quite a lot with my ISP. There are usually two main reasons like others pointed out. 

 

1) ISP trying to throttle specific type of traffic 

2) Bad routing / peering

 

The first one is unlikely since steam traffic should look like just any other HTTPS traffic (unless steam uses http or your ISP is using DPI to try to figure out where the requests are going to limit them). 

 

While the second one is very likely and have dealt with this quite a lot. This can happen with very reputed datacenters too depending on the content and country you're trying to access.

 

This is where VPN comes in very handy (especially something like Cloudflare WARP). Your ISP might have a very good peering to the DC that the VPN is hosted on which in turn might have a good peering with the DC that hosts steam game files which will in turn give you a much better download speed. 

 

The critical part here is that game downloads are not latency critical. So even connecting to a VPN halfway around the world might actually give you a lot higher speeds vs connecting to VPN closest to you depending on how your ISP routing and peering is setup. 

 

Give Cloudflare WARP a try too, if you're not nitpicky about location selection and since most ISPs "should" have a better peering to Cloudflare's edge nodes. You'll likely end up having a better experience overall if you have an ISP like mine. Just remember to turn it off / use split tunneling while playing / doing something that requires better latency since VPN usually always adds more latency (unless your ISP is super bad at being an ISP).