Does Steam hog bandwidth or is it displaying incorrectly?

Question

I'm currently downloading a game on steam. It's painfully slow, and it's probably going to take around 9 hours.

What I don't understand however is the fact that steam is download at around 410kbps, while I have a 3.4mbps download speed. When steam is downloading, the internet in my house is rendered basically useless. It took me ~2 minutes to load the Ask a Question page. So why, if steam is only downloading 410kbps is my internet suffering such a huge loss? Surely I should still have 3mbps to play with. Or - since steam insists on using all my internet - why am I not downloading a game at 3.4mbps? (Although I suspect this could be due to steam's servers. Though some people can download at much faster than this so why can't I)

Stranger yet, if I download a game through origin it downloads at 700kbps-1mbps and doesn't kill my internet half as much as steam.

Is this an issue related to steam or my internet?

Solution

This sounds like a problem converting between bytes and bits to me.

Steam download rates are specified in kilo/mega-bytes (MBps) per second while your internet speed is measured in mega-bits (Mbps) Capitalisation of the "b" is important in working out whether you are working in bits or bytes and is often left out entirely when it is important to know.

If you have a 3.4 megabit (Mbps) connection then your download will be somewhere around 0.425 megabytes per second. (3.4 / 8 = bits to bytes conversion). In this case your internet is slow/lagging because Steam is fully saturating your connection.

This 0.425 megabytes per second would give you a rate of 25.5 megabytes per minute, 1530 megabytes per hour. Given that your download will take 9 hours this tells me your download is of the order of 13 gigabytes, which sounds normal for a modern game.

This also tells me that Origin either sucks, big time, or they have some pretty good compression going on. If their download speed is truly 1 mega-bit per second then they are failing at providing servers and network pipes that can handle the load. If it is 1 megabyte per second (sounds unlikely as your internet is fine) then Origin is doing some pretty good compression.

If you do want to stop Steam from hogging your internet connection then you can go into the options (Steam -> Settings -> Downloads) and set up a limit for the download rate. Note that the speeds listed there are in kilobytes so you'll need to multiply by 8 to get an approximate speed in mbps. For example 256KBps is roughly 2048Kbps which is around 2Mbps.