Download Speeds

[ByteDrums]

I currently am averaging 100mbps for my downloads. My router tells me I get about 800. My girlfriend and I are next to each other both connected with ethernet, but she gets about 600mbps when I get much less, listed above. Is there anything that's different about my downloads that she is getting more? It is so confusing as we are on the same network.

[Chompman]

Steam defaults to MB/s so make sure you are not seeing that on yours and the other pc switched theirs to mbps as 1 MB is 8 mb.

Or it could be based on the router as sometimes certain router ports will have different speeds so you need to check that on the router itself or just an issue somewhere on your pc.

[ByteDrums]

We both have the bits per second turned on, I even swapped our ethernet ports and that seemed to give me worse download speeds.

[PsychoBall]

Check the traffic shaping settings in your router's control panel. You can make some adjustments so it will distribute bandwidth equally.

Are your using onboard NICs on both computers? What is the usual speed that you get outside of steam when you download large files? Run a speed test on the slower computer to see what kind of speeds you can get.

This can be caused by a number of things. The router might be traffic shaping. Something on the slower PC might be using bandwidth and you aren't aware of it. The slower computer might have an older NIC that can't take advantage of the bandwidth. You'll need to check all of this stuff to figure out why it's going slower.

Another thing to watch out for is someone using your wireless network without you being aware of it. I assume your router has wifi enabled. Log-in to the control panel and check to see if someone is using it. They might be connected and there is only 100mbps of bandwidth available. It's very easy to access wifi on any router even if you have it password protected. It's unsecure by design.

What I would do is log-in to the control panel and set-up some rules. You can limit access to the internet by MAC address. This will prevent people from connecting to the router. Once you've done that you can set-up traffic shaping rules to ensure the router splits bandwidth equally between the two computers when both are connected and sending data over your LAN.

I had this problem many years ago. I lived in the sticks back then and thought no one would ever attempt to use my wifi. One night around 1am I was playing L4D1 with my friends when my ping times got very high and disconnected from the server. I went out for a smoke and noticed a car parked on the side of the road near my property. There were four people in it with laptops.

I went back inside and logged into the router. There were four new devices connected to it. I yanked the power cord out of it. I went back out to finish my smoke. The people in the car sat there for a few more minutes frantically typing away on their keyboards. After a few minutes they gave up and drove away.

I checked the traffic logs. They were all downloading stuff over torrents. I had to change my router's MAC address and re-connect to my ISP to get a new IP because peers from those torrents were saturating my LAN with traffic attempting to connect to the four peers that had been on my network.

You should check to see if you have something similar going on. Maybe your neighbors are leeching off your bandwidth. It's very common and easy to do. WPA is easy to by-pass and the "security" it provides is useless. If another device is already connected to the wifi network all you have to do is send packets that force it to disconnect. When the device re-connects it'll send a encrypted packet to the router that contains the password. You can capture it and send it from your own device. The router will let you connect even though you don't know the actual password.

I see this all of the time. If you live in an apartment complex there might be multiple people leeching your bandwidth without your knowledge. You should log-in to your router from time to time and check the logs and the list of devices connected to it. Most people have things like printers that are connected to the wifi. These can easily be knocked offline and forced to re-send the auth packet without anyone noticing it.

We're going to need more information about your LAN and the computer to help you with specific instructions. Have you ever used your routers control panel? What kind of router is it? Was it provided by your ISP? How is your network set-up and is there anything on it other than these two PCs? What kind of CAT5/6 cables are you using? It could be something as simple as you have an older CAT cable that can not handle all the bandwidth. Try switching the cables between the two PCs and see what happens.