Have you tried limiting the download speed?
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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This. Link instability and packet loss is common when the link is being utilized to its max theoretical capacity, as opposed to your ISP having a soft bandwidth cap.
Cap your download speed in steam settings 20% lower than your max download speed (possibly lower) to give the link layer some breathing room.
Source: Network-dude by trade.
I tried throttling it down to 1/3 of my max and still had the same problem
I just tried various limits, and still having the same issue
I have a 500Mbps symmetrical fiber connection
Are you using your ISP's modem/router?
Try a bufferbloat test: https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat
If this is the cause, essentially the ISP is buffering a lot of data on their side to make sure it's ready to send to your router ASAP, but that also means that anything else being requested gets queued behind all of that Steam download data, so it takes forever for anything to load although it should eventually load.
You can also try pinging google or something while downloading, you might see the ping response times go from a few ms to seconds.
Yes, I am using the ISP provided equipment (Calix 844G-1) and also a TP-Link Gigabit switch
https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat?test-id=1bbb92c6-7e60-4efb-93f5-d9f00910a5b3
Sounds like steam is saturating your connection, as the other user said, limit your download speed to somewhere below your connection speed.
The steamdeck may be fine because it had a slower wifi connection.
Rare, but it could be a nat table exhaustion. My old 'commander' modem would do the same thing if I opened a bittorrent client.
Try a free or trial VPN like tunnelbear to see if this is the cause. It's probably not, but it's one more thing you can try.
You might be onto something there, doesn't seem to be happening when connected to a VPN
Ive acc had this for years, steam just seems to be a massive network hog. I think it might have something to do with a router setting, but my solution is to set my download speed cap to around 2mb/s below my internet speed (i have 8mb/s internet) and that seems to do fine.