Downloading games with steam keeps killing my internet connection

[Crazybite]

As title says: when downloading a game in steam it kills my internet connection. I would like to fix this issue.

Downloading from any website with browser or other game clients like origin, epic, blizzard is not an issue and it goes at max speed most of the time. but when I download in steam my internet connection drops after a few (2 or 3) minutes and I HAVE TO RESET MY MODEM AND ROUTER to get the internet connection back up.

I have found several "solutions" but these aren't a fix. I have to set a download limit of 4 MB/s and if that doesn't keep the connection "alive" I have to go even lower, 2 or 3 MB/s. So this is not a fix. Downloading games of 50 GB will take a lot of time this way.

Other "solutions" involve disabling internet sharing on a WiFi connection, but I am using a wired card so I can't find this option.

Other "solutions" I find have you delete steam cache and changing "regions" but this is not a fix. This does not help at all.

What can I do to fix steam download issue?

I am using Win 10 64bit

[JHarlequin]

When the stay at home orders came out and started keeping people from going out, Steam and other online services saw increases in internet traffic, as well as all internet traffic went up as more people were using their computers.

In an effort to avoid overloading any systems and to keep all people connected, steam basically throttled a max limit as well as all internet providers adjusted their limits.

Even though steam has reduced how much you can download at any moment, your internet provider has also cut back on how much you can do at any time.

So basically, until those limits are lifted, your steam download is likely to hit your limit almost automatically as it is a lot more traffic than just communication or packet transfers.

The answer is basically, get a provider that isn't limiting download speeds, but almost every provider is limiting those speeds in some way right now.

[Crazybite]

This is not because of Covid-19. I have this issue for a long time now. Finally fed up with having to limit steam to download games and updates to crawling speeds... I feel not faster than DIAL UP.. But it's only STEAM. Origin can go full speed, Epic can go full speed, Browser goes full speed. Blizzard etc. all have no issues keeping connection alive and downloading at max speed. Steam should go full speed to. Period.

There must be a solution.

[Crazybite]

I've seen "solutions" that go nowhere. I am not on WiFi. I cannot disable a WiFi channel that I don't use. I can't disable any internet sharing protocol in Win 10 cause the LAN adapter does not have that "Tab"

Yet I see this "issue" pop up on google search before covid times.

EXAMPLE:

Steam dropping internet connection *Possible Fix* :: Help and ...
steamcommunity.com › forum
Translate this page
25 aug. 2015 — This topic has been locked ... I was able to isolate the problem to the ethernet card itself (my wifi card was fine, router was fine (on a T1 line so download speeds are ... In this case it was an Intel I218-LM ethernet card (On an Lenovo ... I still see it dropping the steam download rate to zero every now and then ...

Other posts from 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, etc. etc. are all similar, steam kills internet connection when downloading a game, or game update. It can be "restored" by resetting router and modem or rebooting PC.

Severely slowing down steam on purpose to 1 or 2MB/s to download anything is just not a solution in my honest opinion.

[nullable]

Well one thing you might consider is ISP issues, or even ISP configuration. It's possible they're throttling downloads via Steam or there's some other issue they need to diagnose and sort out. One thing users seem to have a hard to accepting is when it comes to their internet connections they actually have very little control over it. If the problem is occurring at some point outside of your modem or system, then nothing you do will have much influence.

For example once upon a time my company was having an issue where we had service through Charter cable, and fallback service through ATT. The Charter service worked fine, but when connecting to a certain business critical service (Azure) we'd experience a lot of packet loss which severely affected performance and caused software to fail as requests timed out. We discovered the issue, but we can't make Charter route packets correctly through fiddling on our end. Charter had to figure out what was going on and fix it. In the meantime we had to rely on the fallback service. And it took days to sort out.

And it may not be a Steam issue at all. It could be an ISP issue that just manifests itself when using Steam. Just like we only had packet loss when connecting to Azure. But we didn't have issues with similar data being done through Amazon S3, or anything else. And it wasn't an Azure issue as no one else was reporting outages or packet loss issues.

Steam has hundreds of millions of users encompassing nearly every ISP there is. So sure, other people are bound to have the same/similar issue. I've used Steam over a half a dozen ISPs over the last 16 years. I can't say I've ever had issues when using Steam. But there's a dozen possibilities for your situation too. If none of your local configuration or tweaks is doing the job you're going to have to entertain an issue outside of your realm of control.

[Crazybite]

If it all ties down to being throttled down my ISP is not telling me or straight up lying about it. I have not changed ISPs in years and if they throttle down steam, why do they not throttle down origin, epic, blizzard etc. for that same reason?

Knowing it is only happening in steam, if my ISP is throttling me down why does my entire home network need a reboot? why does it not simply download untill the limit is reached and stay at that speed? Cause that is what throttling down a connection does. It does not or never will kill your entire home network no matter how fast my pc wants to download something. If I get 5 mb/s from a server I cant ever get 10 mb/s. If I set steam to download at 10 mb/s and my ISP is throttling steam down to 5 my pc would simply not go above that 5 mb/s limit. And nobody can tell me otherwise it's not how it works.

Writing this down tells me this problem is STEAM. Not internet provider.

If it's somehow an issue related to internet not being stable in some situations, on any other dates the download speeds should increase cause "problems" don't stay "problems" forever when and if they get fixed.

I've just done a google search on "Does my ISP throttle down steam?" and this comes back with only results about "general slow connections, and how to fix these" IMO if nobody writes about it or having any complaints about it it's not the issue...

If anyone wants to help out here are some of my PC specs: (since I read about some hardware being a real bully (killer network adapter and driver/software))

Mainboard: MSI
CPU: AMD ryzen 7 3800x
GPU: Asrock RX580
Memory: 16GB
Network: Realtek PCIe GbE family controller
SSD: AData SU800

The network adapter is connected via cable to a router and this router is connected via cable to the ISP modem/router (where the router mode is disabled.) The router also has a WiFi capability so phones and tablet devices can connect to internet.

Router is Netgear WNR2000v5 with the latest firmware loaded V1.0.0.74
I've had many different routers and never have had any issues with steam but if there is need to re-configure the router to handle steam correctly (like forwarding ports) I found this here: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8571-GLVN-8711&l=dutch

Seeing you need a whole range of ports forwarded for normal operation of steam, even to log into the client. yet everything is working but downloading at full speed? I'm sure I've tested this before with port forwarding (but I can try it again and see what happens..)

I'm checking what modem type the router is connected to but I have difficulty getting to this information. (e.g. modem is not that easy to get to being screwed to the wall etc.)

[Crazybite]

Tried it with forwarding ports. Quitting all steam processes before launching it with ports forwarded.

I have reserved an internal IP for my PC so every time it gets the same IP.

Tried downloading and installing a game from my library I see the speed go up to 10MB/s and then it trinkles down to 0.

Checking my router status page internet is gone. not available. steam says the installation will take two years to complete but with no internet that's a lie. There's no more connection untill I manually reboot the router.

Reboot router and set throttle in steam to 3MB/s and now it is downloading. It will still take quite a few hours instead of minutes it should take.

I'm not a computer idiot. Why does steam even require forwarded ports... I don't need it for epic, blizzard, origin etc. and steam works just fine without forwarding ports. all games I own work online just fine. (ok exept for the download issue...)

In the past I have had a www server, I have ran game servers that required ports forwarded to static internal IP adresses so I know how this works.

I can try going arround the router directly to modem but this requires me to reset the entire network settings and will take some time to test.

[crunchyfrog]

Crazybite lähetti viestin:

This is not because of Covid-19. I have this issue for a long time now. Finally fed up with having to limit steam to download games and updates to crawling speeds... I feel not faster than DIAL UP.. But it's only STEAM. Origin can go full speed, Epic can go full speed, Browser goes full speed. Blizzard etc. all have no issues keeping connection alive and downloading at max speed. Steam should go full speed to. Period.

There must be a solution.

Thing is, Steam games download differently to other places. All games on Steam are both encrypted and compressed. So you can typically see some games donwload a chunk, stop while it sorts out the data and writes it, before starting again.

This can often give the impression the speed is slow, as your bottleneck is usually your hard drive in this case.

And this may also be what is causing your modem to fail. Due to that unencryption work, there's more than likely something extra the modem has to do and if it ain't up to the job, it could cause issues like this.

In which case, the issue is your modem. The fact that Steam happens to be the only thing that pushes it over the edge does NOT make it a Steam fault necessarily.

I had a modem once that did similar things. The only thing you can do is first off, ensure that you've got the current firmware for it installed, have it cold rebooted and if it still fails, try to beg or borrow a replacement for testing. If it worsk fine with a replacement, there's your issue.

[Satoru]

Fundamentally steam 'killing your router' is basically a router issue. Steam does separate streams for downloads via HTTPS. This is basically entirely normal and isn't magic. If your router cant handle what amounts to basic HTTPS traffic then there's something up with the NAT table on your router that's causing issues. Or you router need a reboot.

[Crazybite]

Satoru lähetti viestin:

Fundamentally steam 'killing your router' is basically a router issue. Steam does separate streams for downloads via HTTPS. This is basically entirely normal and isn't magic. If your router cant handle what amounts to basic HTTPS traffic then there's something up with the NAT table on your router that's causing issues. Or you router need a reboot.

This made me have another good look at my routers NAT table and the steam guide on ports needed for steam.

I deleted all the rules in my NAT and made new entries.

1 Steam UDP 27015-27030
2 Steam TCP 27014-27050

Having forwarded these ports the connection keeps "alive" for another minute extra but still kills the entire home network having me require to reboot modem and router.

If I read the document correctly these are the only ports needed to download content from steam. Theres other ports on the list but these have not got to do with this I believe.

I feel at odds having to forward port 80 and 443 cause this will also cause other devices to have trouble accessing websites. if I do forward these ports and then request a webpage with my phone it gets no response since the response is sended to my PC and not my phone.

What else can I do? Look for a new router? Go back to basic with no wi-fi? This feels like steps back instead of forwards.

[nullable]

Crazybite lähetti viestin:

If it all ties down to being throttled down my ISP is not telling me or straight up lying about it. I have not changed ISPs in years and if they throttle down steam, why do they not throttle down origin, epic, blizzard etc. for that same reason?

Why, in my example, was Charter only dropping packets to Azure, and not also Amazon S3?

I understand your reasoning, and it's not wrong. But there's no particular reason an issue must affect all other similar services either if it was an ISP issue of some kind.

We'd been running Charter for years, and then one day we started having an issue...

This is just something to keep on the table if nothing else works. Maybe you do just need to replace the router/modem. But at a certain point, like I said, there's a lot with your connection you don't control. If none of the typical clientside fixes resolve it. You may need to cast a wider net.

[Crazybite]

I'm quite stumped... with no ports forwarded I need to set a cap to steam as low as 3MB/s and it's happy to download at this speed. Sure I'm not happy with this since 50GB of game downloading will take ages. but with ports forwarded I can go for a while at a limit of 8MB/s it still locks up my entire home network. after a minute or 10. having me needing to reboot everything. Now with ports forwarded the 3MB/s is no longer required and I can set this limit at 5MB/s (that I feel is still very slow speed for current age/times.)

It should be way better performing.

I'm gonna take a look at a new router if I can test the issue without my router inbetween modem and PC and see how it goes..

[Kargor]

Crazybite lähetti viestin:

I'm quite stumped... with no ports forwarded I need to set a cap to steam as low as 3MB/s and it's happy to download at this speed. Sure I'm not happy with this since 50GB of game downloading will take ages. but with ports forwarded I can go for a while at a limit of 8MB/s it still locks up my entire home network. after a minute or 10. having me needing to reboot everything. Now with ports forwarded the 3MB/s is no longer required and I can set this limit at 5MB/s (that I feel is still very slow speed for current age/times.)

There's just something very weird on your setup. Steam doesn't even need port-forwarding -- whatever you're forwarding should have 0 impact on anything.

[Crazybite]

Kargor lähetti viestin:

......

There's just something very weird on your setup. Steam doesn't even need port-forwarding -- whatever you're forwarding should have 0 impact on anything.

....

So then where is the problem....

but my setup is not pretty weird IMO... just a modem > router > PC1, tablet, phone1, phone2.

Pretty basic IMO.

[Reggaejunkiedrew]

Try changing DNS servers maybe?
If you're just using your automatic dns via your ISP try this instead
https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/setting-up-1.1.1.1

[Reggaejunkiedrew]

Also have you tried going through a VPN to see if it helps? Forgive me if you said either of these and I missed it