Might be DSL, i'm not familiar with all the different technologies. Regardless at 1.5Mbps would equate to at best 187k/s, but with parity bits and overhead of the ip protocol it's more like 150k/s

Dialup on phone i believe had a max bandwidth of 64Kbit/s, which due to overhead and noise lowered closer to 56Kbit/s or approx 5k/s.

Is steam or gog throttling you?

The internet and connections is like a chain, you're only as fast as the slowest link. GoG being overseas has a few big gateways they have to go through. So i'm sure if you were in say the UK or Europe you may get superior speeds (For GoG) than in the US. Same thing if you're closer to say Seattle, New York or San Fransisco where they hold most of the servers, i bet you'd have much higher connection (For Steam).

I'd heard from the down low that while a number of ISP's can tote they have X speed, they are actually throttled while other companies are not throttled. It could very well be your ISP. I don't have all the details, i can only speak of what i've heard from someone in the business second hand.

Until everyone has Fiberoptics and can transfer data at the speed of light at the highest speeds, i doubt everyone will be treated equally.

Did you contact Support like Ice_Mage suggested?

Your understanding is wrong, as that was never a thing. It may be that you backed a kickstarter where they gave you a code that you could redeem on GOG or Steam, but that's a very different thing. It would never get you anywhere on any day. Stores do not generally give you products you didn't pay for. (Now it's true GOG has occasionally done that with GOG Connect, but it's basically a marketing tool and rarely offered, probably because the costs outweigh the supposed benefits.) Again: so it takes a couple minutes longer than it theoretically could have (if everything in the chain is running at gigabit speeds) and you're sad, boo-hoo. You're obviously not downloading at 1.5Mps speeds. Whether it's 50X faster or 100X faster makes no practical difference. You seem to be focussed on the numbers rather than actual results.

How much of a collection do you have? My collection probably dwarfs yours and I'm managing all that on a 50 megabits (~6 megabytes) per second internet connection.

If you're downloading by hand in the browser, than yeah, poor you (in this regard, GOG really should be shamed for their lack of official support with offline installers).

But if you're using automation to manage your downloads, then let it run, go live your life and you'll play a bit later when it is done.

Keep in mind that some people in Australia are stuck with a whooping low 100kb/s. On the bigger downloads, THAT is insanely slow. But if you have a respectable 3+ megabytes per seconds, you'll get there eventually.

I feel your pain and totally agree.

For the full week of the Halloween sale I could not download above 204 KB/s ... yes you read that right.

GOG seem to be willing to overlook the modern notion in this digital age, of being able to download something after you purchase it. They appear to think it fair you wait a week until doing so.

And no it had nothing to do with my ISP etc, it was totally GOG's fault.

During that same time period I could download from Epic, Steam and other sites at full speed - 5 MB/s.

GOG are happy to take your money, but are reluctant to spend the money on better server delivery to some of their customers.

I wonder how many customers they would get, if they said BUY NOW, DOWNLOAD A WEEK LATER.

And the reality is, that for me in the last year or so I have had poor fluctuating download speeds from GOG. Before that, I nearly always got close to 5 MB/s.

204 KB/s for a week though, is a total disgrace, and GOG should be ashamed ... especially as there seems to be a clear BIAS going on. Who says it is only two hours. It would depend on the size of the game files and the connection speed. It could in fact be days etc.

There is a certain fair expectancy involved, especially in this the digital age and in 2021.

And unlike Steam, a store like GOG could toss in the towel anytime, so it behooves to download your purchases as soon as possible, just in case.

And what about those wanting to play the game as soon as possible.

Just because you and some others are happy to wait, doesn't mean everyone has to follow suit. Who made you the arbiter of what is acceptable or even tolerable?

There is an acceptable low download speed in times of heavy site use, but it isn't 204 KB/s for a week.

How do you know?
Did you do actual traceroutes and for example try a VPN connecting to a location closer to a GOG CDN or different GOG CDNs? If you didn't do this you can't tell it was not your ISPs fault (which is highly likely). Never here in the forum i have seen a consistent display of traceroutes and such which clearly show that actually the GOG backend is to blame and not cheap ass rural ISPs.
Most likely just a cheap ISP again underpaying their routing and bottlenecking on your way to GOG CDN (which they can't afford for steam and epic bc more customers are rioting then).

And ya feel free to send me a pm the next time you experience speed issues/drops. Might try with an Australian VPN then to see if i can confirm it.

I've had a few DLs run at 1/4 their normal speed or slower on rare occasion....and with some games being many GB in size, that can add several extra hours to some DLs.
(of course, that said: I usually just DL at another time or re-try the DL in such cases)

Because like I said, I don't have any download speed issues with other game stores or other sites. It is just limited to GOG.

Don't agree, and think you are just guessing and making assumptions.

For starters, my ISP is owned by the biggest ISP in AUS ... TPG, and I have been using it for decades, and like I said, everything was fine with GOG until about a year ago.

And as far as I am concerned GOG are responsible for their pipeline (routes) and the servers they use. So it is more likely they decided to go cheap, than anything to do with changes at my ISP, which hasn't changed as far as I can tell.

With what you are suggesting, I should be getting poor speeds with any site that isn't some big popular one, which is not the case. Your case also rests on the idea, that GOG aren't popular enough in AUS, which then negates the reason for any bottleneck. So I call bollocks.

And further to that, I never got any fluctuation during the Halloween Sale week, it was a steady 204 KB/s for 24 hours a day ... except the final day where speed got worse and dropped to 102 KB/s. If you are right, speed should have varied at different times. Yesterday, after that sale, I actually downloaded one game at around 3.3 MB/s.

P.S. I am going to be looking into whether I can connect via a different GOG server, but haven't gotten around to that yet, been a tad busy.

Some might also not want to waste the extra electricity or cause extra wear and tear on their PCs by doing things like keeping the PC running overnight for DLs. Try DLing a modern(10-50GB or more) game at such speeds and then see if you think the same*. Such speeds might be good for smaller(older/indie) games, but not for others.
(*if you truly have the patience of a saint and can wait hours or days for a game to DL, then hats off to ya)

Thanks for the offer, but I doubt you would achieve anything definitive.

AUS is a very big place, unlike European countries, with long distances between cities and very poor Internet speeds between those places. So what might be good in Sydney, might be bad In Brisbane etc or vice-a-versa. And it also varies in different locales within our very spread out cities. Most of the country still runs on copper wires ... at least for some of the pipeline ... and yes we do have bottleneck areas ... and late Friday for instance is bad for me.

Kk just let me know if you change should your mind. First basic etablish some baseline test with a very shaky VPN connection
just now utilized the full available VPN bandwidth (which was sadly really disappointing :D) both of Locations in Perth and Sydney and i reached 3 MB/s which is a rather sad value but was all the Tunnel itself could/would sustain right now (no matter the source) - can't say anything about GOG performance yet. Might try with another vpn provider which hopefully gives me a better connection to Australia.

it makes you seem like a spoiled petulant child.

At first, I thought so too (hence my earlier reply), but then I read that:

Now, I don't know why they do that, but keep in mind that download speed is usually measured in bits, not bytes so you have to divide by 8.

That gives him a whooping 187.5KB/s .

That means it takes ~1.55 hours to download 1GB. For a 20GB game (if he likes those), that's ~31 hours and that assumes there a no issues downloading on GOG's end (which there often are).

If I had to download my collection at that speed (which is over 7 terabytes), I don't believe I'd be done in a year.

That is a little ridiculous in 2021.

Something you could try if you feel technically inclined, though its a little crazy that you'd have to resort to that at all is:
- Open up a vm in a cloud provider (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, etc)
- Download the game on the vm (you could potentially use my client for that, you would have to pass it a cookie)
- Open up a download web server on the vm and download your game

However, keep in mind that beyond just the cost of the vm (which would be a negligible 5-10$ per month), there is a network cost for outgoing traffic which may vary a little per cloud provider, but which for AWS (to give you an idea) is 9 cents (US) per GB.

That means that for a terabyte worth of download, you'd be shelling out 90$ in outgoing cloud network cost.

If this is something you'd be potentially interested in, I could look into implementing a secure proxy solution with the client.

EDIT:

Actually, my client support S3 storage. There is a inherent storage cost attached to that when it is a cloud s3 and not an on-prem Minio, but assuming you just use it in a transient way to pipe data out, you could potentially save a lot of money in outgoing traffic. I'd have to do the maths.

My client supports this out of the box. You could just download your games using an s3 storage from a vm in the cloud.

Then, referencing that s3 storage from your local machine, you could do a storage copy (it is a command) to a local disk storage on your machine.

EDIT 2:

Actually AWS S3 is the same pricing for outgoing data as EC2 so it is not saving any money actually.

EDIT 3:

Digital Ocean charges a more affordable 10$/TB for outbound traffic with its Droplets though: https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/billing/bandwidth/

Sometimes, it does pay to look around at what various cloud providers are offering.

EDIT 4:

Actually, this is VERY interesting. I'm totally doing this during Christmas.