First screenshot is my connection to Boston, NY several hours away by plane. The second screenshot is to Toronto which is mere minutes away. As you can see from the pictures there is a world of difference between the throughput of the servers.
When I connect to Toronto/YYZ Steam cache, I get one active connection at 24 Mbps
When I connect to Boston/IAD Steam cache, I get 10 simultaneous active connections at 14–15 Mbps EACH
After the dozens of network tests I've come to the following results
DNS-Toronto Steam hostname resolved to 72.136.199.122
Traceroute- Reached it in 6 hops, 18–24 ms.
Ping- 100/100 received, 0% loss, average 16 ms
TCP 443- tcpTestSucceeded: True
I ran the same tests going East to West and going to Winnipeg, and BC. The results were the same, that when choosing any of the Western servers, it defaults to the yyz Toronto Steam Cache. So selecting say BC, will still have you downloading out of Toronto.
However when you connect to Montreal you will get a slightly stronger connection but this also appears to be throttled, this also comes back 0% loss and 20-ish ms
Conclusion after all of this
Canadian Steam/Rogers is either being throttled deliberately or Toronto Steam cache is overloaded or malfunctioning. As this has been going on for several months now and I'm only now posting about it, I'm going to lean towards the former.
So if you're facing slow download speeds on your gaming PC then the fix is to
Bypass Canadian servers all together.
Also after restarting or updating, ensure your regions don't change.
So a game that is 77gb should take less then 12mins to download, instead would take 5+hrs if you allowed Steam to select your region.
Hope this helps anyone in the future
Does anyone else on experience these problems? It would be interesting to narrow this down to exactly what is causing it.
https://i.redd.it/bwv9u5vce0jh1.png
Source: r/bapccanada · by /u/ozeor