New to Fibre

[UZeRR]

I almost feel like I want to complain with a loaf of bread under my arm. I got MWeb 100 mb fibre for almost a week now. Upload and download speeds (through MWeb) speedtest are supper (94.8 mb/s), through other sites, almost half of MWeb, but i'm guessing its because they are not the service provider.........

Downloads on steam (e.g. huge Ark gaming patches) sometimes reach up to 118 mb/s. But here's the catch......my old 10 mb uncapped ADSL downloaded at 1.2 mb/s and was consistent at that speed. This fibre is going up and down like crazy, even sometimes downloading nothing for up to 5 minutes, then it starts slowly again and built up and drops again. This downloading is also worse during the day, at nighttime its a bit better (business hours are understandable). Sometimes I wonder if ADSL wasnt faster in the total download of these patches......Apart from the downloading speed I see the Showmax still have short loading intervals while the kids watch a movie (was even worse with ADSL).

Pro's - all online games I tested got a average better ping of 10-15% (Ark + World of Tanks ect.). Latency is very consistent and I rarely get any lag spikes, its actually quite nice now to play online games on international servers........BUT then I read from other threads that other service providers got NO downloading slowness (Afrihost ect.) so I was wondering from the people that got fibre for a longer time now, what I am experiencing - is this normal with fibre ?

 

[ponder]

It's probably the isp and not the actual fibre itself. Who is the fibre provider?

 

[Slootvreter]

Probably your account.

 

[stefanl33t]

Remember because of your much higher download speed, your hard drive is actually a bottleneck now.
Think there was a thread explaining this a while back. Might not have been on MyBB though.

Basically Steam downloads too fast for your hard drive to unpack and write.

 

[Space]

Are you on Uncapped from MWeb - try a small Capped account in addition from Afrihost or Axxess just to compare speeds and performance, and then you can decide from there which one to cancel

 

[Fro]

Remember because of your much higher download speed, your hard drive is actually a bottleneck now.
Think there was a thread explaining this a while back. Might not have been on MyBB though.

Basically Steam downloads too fast for your hard drive to unpack and write.

I'm sure his hard drive can write at 10 MB/s.

 

[ponder]

Remember because of your much higher download speed, your hard drive is actually a bottleneck now.
Think there was a thread explaining this a while back. Might not have been on MyBB though.

Basically Steam downloads too fast for your hard drive to unpack and write.

100Mb/s = 12.5MB/s which is nothing for a hard drive

 

[UZeRR]

Its a 500gig / 500gig MWeb capped account, think I must do the other ISP test route, only way to know for sure. Thanks for tips on harddrive, will also look into it.

 

[stefanl33t]

I'm sure his hard drive can write at 10 MB/s.

My bad, it's not the actual speed of the hard drive. It's because of the way certain downloads are handled on Steam. For whatever ridiculous reason, certain games are "packaged" in such a way that they download in smaller chunks, then install said chunks, before resuming and downloading the next.

 

[stefanl33t]

It was something about the hard drive and unpacking, but couldn't remember exactly.
Apologies for my incorrect assumption.

 

[ponder]

It was something about the hard drive and unpacking, but couldn't remember exactly.
Apologies for my incorrect assumption.

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/864979008818608129/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/59u09x/what_is_going_on_every_update_is_like_this_it/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2z5cj3/how_to_deal_with_steam_downloads_cutting_in_and/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/3z7g22/steam_downloads_constantly_dropping_to_0mbps_then/

It's not the HDD as people with SSDs seem to suffer from the same issue. It seems like steam downloads the patches in chunks, unpacks them and updates. While doing this essentially pausing the download until complete before grabbing the next chunk. This would be more noticeable on a fast link than a slow one.

 

[UZeRR]

Well after a week of frustration (mainly wife that can't watch movies), openserve installed my neighbour's fiber line this morning. Had a call from home that the fiber internet is now completely off. Got home, restarted both the Zyxel router and Nokia converter. Started testing line again, no movie from showmax and other sites got any dip loading/screening time. Steam downloads at 11.8 mb/s un-interupted......so no more dipping of download speed.

My conclusion, maybe there was something wrong with this Nokia converter connection (whatever this thing is called), or something in the fiber box on pole or exchange was corrected.....whatever the old problem (so in this case scenario, not the ISP (MWeb) mistake), a new fiber line should run without any problems.

I have never seen Steam downloading in chunks, may be related to certain games by certain developers.......