Why is my internet slow? I just had to fix something wrong by accident.
Why is my internet slow? I just had to fix something wrong by accident.
I've tried turning the screen on and off three times fast. It jumps straight to a speed of 21-22 Mbps with no waiting time at all and stays that way. I have an internet line that goes through fiber optics, but my contract says it is 100 Mpbs so that's what I'm paying for. Speedtest.net shows the results are okay too. Here is a picture of one thing: https://i.imgur.com/6qwrKTa.jpg I can download two big things at once without losing speed even if I am watching a livestream at the same time, but it never goes over 21-22 Mbps and doesn't drop down either. Later in my story I fixed this problem by restarting my computer three times but now when I restart I still get 21-22Mbps instead of the 100Mbps I should get when downloading. This isn't just a Steam thing, it happens on all games too! I have no idea why this is happening and I think it only happens to me on my computer!
The setting says zero, but since I'm on a wire, that shouldn't matter anyway.
I think what you might be doing is using a different tool to check your speed, not the numbers from Steam. Usually downloads are in Megabytes and things like speedtest count megabits. That can actually mean the server if you have another machine on Steam that works faster or slower. Steam is weird for me; some games download at my full gigabit rate while others are really slow. I guess it depends on how popular a game is. Since speedtest works this way, everything seems to be working fine. It's not your router or your ISP because they don't see the difference between those kinds of downloads. Of course check that you aren't using any QoS software, firewalls, or parental controls. If you have a simple config, maybe just factory reset your router and only set the admin and wifi passwords to make sure nothing got accidentally locked up. So you can try disabling IPv6 without worry. IPv6 causes problems for many people and you might get inconsistent results when some sites use IPv6 while others use IPv4. After that, it looks like some software is blocking certain types of traffic. One really common problem is any "gamer" network stuff bundled with bloatware on motherboards or video cards. A very common name is CFOSpeed, but anything that claims to favor one kind of traffic over another should be removed.
Hey, yeah sure enough I have tested a bunch of things and all the speeds are the same in mbps. After restarting my router the speed went back to normal but then it dropped back down to about 20 for some reason. Even though I turned off IPv6 before posting this, including changing DNS to Google and Cloudflare, that didn't help either.
Hey, I figured out a little problem with my setup. It's not perfect, though. Sometimes if I turn off and back on my internet connection, it works fine. Other times I have to restart my router, but then it still doesn't work properly. What could be causing this trouble?
Update your post with full system hardware specs and OS details. Check network info like ISP, modem, or router. Make sure to include make and model of your PC. Open Command Prompt type "ipconfig /all" without quotes and paste the results here. Use Task Manager and Resource Monitor at the same time but only pick one tool to look at first. If speed is okay then goes down slower when you change settings, something might be happening just like that. Keep both tools open so you can see what's going on during any test. It takes some trial and error to figure out which thing is slowing things down. You can check the columns to see what data is being shown. Pay attention right away if another app or program starts running in the background when speed drops.
The Z490 Gigabyte Gaming X with an i7 10700K, RTX 3080, and 32GB of RAM doesn't seem to matter because it's not used in many places where that name is well-known. The router I'm using is a ZTE model ZXHN F670L from February 2022 (it comes from my ISP) and I connected it with a cable. The issue is everything is stuck at 20Mbps. I can open four tabs, each getting 20Mbps, so that's 80Mbps total coming in, but none of them get faster than 20Mbps unless I restart the internet connection or try again. It may not work all the time.
ISP is important because there might be other people who know the company, its rules, and the stuff they give out. Tom's thing is all over the world. Do you have a fiber optic connection? You said using a "cable": what kind of cable are you talking about and which one is it connecting to? The ipconfig /all results look too short. Check that only one network adapter (wired or wireless) is on. Don't turn two on at once, or even turn any two on. Just one should be active. Try turning off IPv6 because it's often a bad idea. Use only IPv4 instead. The 20 Mbps limits with an overall cap of 80 Mbps might be adjustable in the modem/router. Can you log into the ZTE modem router using your browser and 192.168.1.1? If yes, there are probably some settings to change. If you can't log in at all, someone who has full control over the modem or router needs to help you.
If I went here and asked how to stop each stream from going faster than 20mbps, I'd tell you it's very hard to do. There are probably apps for that, but you would have already installed them. Some routers can limit traffic by IP address instead of stopping individual streams, so you could get 20mbps on your whole computer but no more than one stream at a time. I haven't seen any router that stops each session to only 20mbps. The speedtest works fine though. It can run many data streams, like torrent downloads, and maybe go faster than 20mbps if there are several sessions happening at once. If you aren't using software on your PC, then it's probably the internet company (ISP). They would have to be very unfair to do this. They let speedtest hit full speed so you can pretend you get the speed they sell while blocking everything else. That is unlikely and means they must have a special expensive traffic manager in their network doing the limiting. Not sure if there is an easy way to test that. If you turn on a virtual private network (VPN) and then run the speedtest through it, the ISP should block it at 20mbps. The problem is the VPN makes the number look higher because of extra work. So this isn't a great test. Not sure what comes next. Do you have another computer or maybe even your phone... but you would need to find some file to compare against since you can't run steam on a phone.