This last Sunday, I woke up to some network issues. I have FIOS 75Mb service (don’t know why I don’t have the 980Mb service, as it looks to cost about the same, but that’s another topic). My wife and I (both engineers) trouble shot it down to the Verizon modem/router. A tech came out on Monday and arrived at the same conclusion and replaced the router. All was well again and I downloaded even more Orbx scenery and simmy stuff.
So, I ran home at lunchtime today and started the download for Dovetail’s FSW. But I saw the transfer rate drop to zero. And I lost my internet access. I had no time to do any troubleshooting, but I’m becoming a little suspicious of the Steam download – only because of the coincidence, nothing substantial. But I just google steam downloads and failing internet connections and my suspicion deepened.
Have any of you run into a steam download killing your internet? I still think it’s unlikely, because we’ve been using steam for years. Between two teenage boys and myself we’ve download…I don’t know… a lot. LOL.
In your Steam client / Settings / Downloads does it help if you change ‘Download Region’? To narrow it down you could see if it’s that local Steam ‘node’ overloaded or something that your ISP is doing. Some ISP’s have local Valve caches, but they sometimes don’t work well, so switching to a region further away is sometimes faster.
If that’s not it then in your Task Monitor you can bring up something called the Resource Monitor (assuming Win10 here) from the ‘Performance’ tab (there’s a link at the bottom, beneath the graphs). In the Resource Monitor click the ‘Network’ tab, set a large Steam download going and ‘tick’ the Steam.exe process to focus on it. In that it lists the network addresses Steam is talking to:
You can then take one with the most active send/receive bytes (likely a download server, Steam uses about 10 concurrent connections) and then run a windows CMD prompt, i.e. Win+R ‘cmd’. In the command window try something like this (substituting the address you pick from your system from the screenshot above)
tracert 205.196.6.145
That will then tell you where the delay is happening, i.e. at your modem end, your ISP on-point, something in-between or the Valve server endpoint for the region you picked.
Currently I have no internet access at home. I haven’t had any time to do anything yet, but I’ll reboot the router when I get home and see I I can get to the point where I can try what you suggest.
Did you hear about the recent Windows Update that broke DNS in Server 2008? Minimal impact to us, as most clients have long moved on, but it sure caused chaos at those that hadn’t. New firewalls purchased, etc.
Well, it turns out that Verizon had to reboot their ONT box. I still have no root cause and I’m not terribly confident that it’s not going to happen again.
