Steam's Performance in Australia

I've spent a lot of money with Steam. Sometimes through no choice of my own (Skyrim) and at others because I love the sales and bargains they offer. My wife has an account and my daughter does as well. Both with many games purchased from the service.

Despite my desire to be forced into using a service like Steam my experience here has been quite good (other than the Skyrim activation date fiasco where PC users of the game had to wait a day longer than the release date to play the game due to America being a day behind).

Unfortunately over the past 3-4 months the entire Steam platform has become more and more frustrating. These days I cannot even watch a video preview of the game because it won't stream anywhere near quick enough. A good example of this - I tried to watch the Baldurs Gate trailer tonight and gave up as, 10min after starting the video it still hadn't downloaded completely and was stopping every 10 secs for a minute to catch up.

Downloads and updates have become a major problem as well with a download speed of 12-28 kbs on a good day! It's not my internet connection as I can stream film, youtube etc very fast and download at 1.5 mbs from other sites.

I'm only making guesses as to why all this would be and I do have friends that use steam and suffer the same performance issues. Anyone else in Australia feel the same way?

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Netshroud Jan 30, 2013 @ 2:09am

What ISP are you with?

filmogriter Jan 30, 2013 @ 2:10am

I'm with Dodo. I get high speeds on everything else with them.

Gottheart Jan 30, 2013 @ 2:40am

I'm with Bigpond, and I honestly don't have any of these problems. Maybe you're steam is slow because it's a big application and your computer can't keep up anymore?
How much ram and hard drive space do you have? My other computer gets slow and freezes if the hard drive is near full.

filmogriter Jan 30, 2013 @ 1:32pm

Hi Gottheart, thanks for your reply (and I forgot to thank you Netshroud). 2TB SATA with 8GB RAM. Trust me, I'm running BF3 at full res playing online without a glitch. It's strange that it's only steam that has this problem. Same Steam problems on our other 4 machines here as well.

Netshroud Jan 30, 2013 @ 3:54pm

Sounds like a possible networking issue, I'm not seeing the same problems on Optus Cable. Have you tried the relevant Steam Support FAQs?

weeksy77 Jan 30, 2013 @ 6:13pm

Yeah - just to chime in - I'm not having any issues through Internode - as previously mentioned, you may be having some networking issues.

Might be a silly questions, but if you are using wi-fi, is it password protected? If not, you may have people "borrowing" your bandwidth which could be slowing down the connection - you'd be surprised how many people still have this happen....

filmogriter Feb 2, 2013 @ 3:16am

Thanks guys, very secure wi-fi and the gaming machine is connected via cable. I will head to the support FAQ's thanks Netshroud. See what I can dig up. I will also check into any network issues though I feel if it is only Steam that is having problems networking may be fine. I appreciate your input and if I manage to sort it out I will let you know how :)

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