I’m located in Austria and it took me 51 hours to get halfway through the download of the game with a constant speed of around 8 Mbits/s (~1MB/s). I’m not throttled anywhere and none of the suggestions (changing DNS, Delivery Optimization, …) worked for me. In a last ditch effort I booted up NordVPN and connected to Germany. The download speed went to 80 Mbits/s immediately.
Is that just bad server infrastructure where I’m located? Does Microsoft throttle the speed depending on the location (that’s pretty obvious actually, when it jumps to 10 times the speed with a VPN) and why the hell are they doing this?
This game is basically unplayable for me if I’m not using a VPN. Is there any other way?
The most reasonable explanation I’ve heard for this is that ISPs throttle speeds when connected to Microsoft update servers (this being a necessary evil to avoid crashes with a sudden of influx of downloads every time windows updates). Connecting through a VPN means they don’t know you’re connected to the Microsoft update servers, so they don’t throttle. I have no idea if this is the actual reason, but it makes sense to me.
Shitty servers is your answer. Austria is smaller so probably they decided to not invest into servers. I only seen 300mbps speeds max, it doesn’t go higher than that. So even when there’s no traffic the speed is pathetic.
I would first have a look at your own internet provider, they are the most likely to be throttling. Besides, I cannot imagine a reason why MS would selectively throttle regions/countries.
If using a VPN in your own country limits your speed similarly, it could be the MS 2020 servers in your region/locale being bandwidth limited or capped. Using a VPN in a nearby country or region and the speeds being faster would provide some further evidence that it’s most likely the fore mentioned, though it could be a combination of other factors as well.
Here in New Zealand I get about 12mbit max both at home and at work. Very shit considering this is Microsoft. Why can I download their ISOs or Windows Updates at full speed, but MSFS crawls?
I don’t even have to connect to a different country than where I live, I just hop through some local vpns and suddenly I see a massive change in download speeds.
There is definitely something weird because after an hour if play time MSFS literally shuts my internet down until I reboot and power cycle the modem by unplugging it from the wall.
It is not the modem and not the ISP. No other game does this. ONLY MSFS.
I wonder if you’re being directed to your nearest server regardless of load. So maybe the UK services are overloaded but they don’t have a means of redirecting you elsewhere.
ISP doesn’t have to be intentionally throttling to be the issue. ISPs all use different routing and pathways to get out to destinations. you can use a traceroute command with the vpn active and not active to see the differences. If there is noticeable latency in one of the packet hops, that’s probably the issue. Good luck getting it fixed if it is. your ISP isn’t going to be able to change that at the drop of a hat, and it might not even be at their end, may be due to the backbone router they are contracted to.
I sometimes get awful speeds with MSFS downloads, particularly with content manager downloads, until I turn on cloudflare warp. Using Verizon fios in a major city. Doesn’t happen all the time. Pretty much the only software that gives me an issue like this.
It’s complicated and I think all the answers you are getting are part of it. You may have more peers in Germany as well for the P2P component of the download, you probably have less hops because the Nord data center is going to be a business connection vs a personal connection. When my wife and my businesses switched to operating from home during COVID, we had issues with video conferencing and kept saying we had a poor connection. Ran traces and had like 10’s of hops to get to end destination and routed to halfway across the country and back again. Switched to business and even though the upload speed is faster it’s not really needed, we have a near direct route to wherever we are going with minimal hops.
Slow downloads is the reason I stopped playing this game. I tried VPN as well but even that was a pain most of the time.
I am from South Africa and my friends game downloads fine. We have scheduled power cuts so just letting it download through the night isn’t even a option. Such a great game spoiled by download speeds is a real shame.
Im from Austria too, just reloaded the game this week. About 120 Mbits although 500 should be possible with our connection. 120 seems to be the limit serverside. No VPN.
This squares with my experience. Would explain why cloudflare warp works to increase the speed back to expectations. Only thing that’s puzzling is that it seems arbitrary; why single out MSFS for this sort of thing? As far as I can, my ISP doesn’t throttle scenery streaming during gameplay, so that’s a bit weird too why they bother to throttle the one-time downloads and not the ongoing stuff.