Download quotas have become more generous since Steam. That said, if you can force it to use servers that are unmetered for your ISP without compromising performance, there’s little reason to waste bandwidth.
This article originally appeared on Lifehacker Australia.
Rather than tweak your firewall settings or dig into a hosts file, you can just install Nigel Bree’s steam-limiter. It comes pre-packaged with profiles for Telstra BigPond, iiNet, Internode, Optus, iPrimus and Adam, which should cover a good chunk of Australian gamers.
Once installed, the program is required to stay active while Steam is running. It will then prevent Steam from connecting to non-approved servers… and keep your quota happy.
There are some limitations with the tool, though these shouldn’t affect the vast majority. One thing to keep in mind is that you should start steam-limiter before running the Steam client, to make sure it works correctly.
steam-limiter [Google Project Hosting]
Comments
37 responses to “Ensure Steam Always Downloads From Australian Content Servers”
That’s sweet! Now if only there were some sort of way to avoid the download times…maybe some sort of storage device could be used. Something sort of…disk-shaped…
you’ll find various international clouds have better up rates over Australian clouds.
That is not a sentence.
I see what you failed to do there…
Why not? I see a capital at the beginning and a full stop at the end. How’s it not a sentence.
I mean…
Y nawt? I c a cap @ begin and full stop @ end. Howzitnot sentence?
Because it doesn’t fill the grammatical requirements for an English sentence.
Download quotas have become more generous since Steam launched.
Download quotas have become more generous since the advent of Steam.
Download quotas have become more generous since Steam became a major market force.
Those are sentences.
I still don’t understand. What are the grammatical requirements for a sentence?
Oh wait, I see now. It makes no sense saying ‘since steam’. Since steam what?
Bingo.
It works if it’s an event. Like, say the Woodstock example that @trainsientmind posted. It could also work if it had an implied meaning: “I’ve been terribly depressed since Aerith” implying that an event happened involving her that the person being spoken to would know about (you know… like, that one time she was murdered). Even then, it’s not really grammatically fantastic. If it requires implied knowledge, things get a bit iffy. It’s fine as a spoken sentence, but as a written one it makes my teeth hurt.
Make no mistake; I will die alone.
Hahaha. Nice. I will die with my family around me. And hopefully they’ll be heartbroken FOR YEARS!
This entire thread between the two of you is a fantastic read. Love it.
Way above the standard of the Internet comment threads world’s over.
looks fine to me, “download quotas” meaning total quota of your download, “generous” meaning or rather another meaning, increase in size or less use of it. Steam is well Steam, put the 3 together = makes sense. It is a sentence.
It’s an incomplete sentence.
Well, consider it as Steam: the EVENT, rather than Steam: the ongoing service. 🙂
It makes sense if you read it like, ‘Music festivals have been over-romanticized since Woodstock’.
Learned about this when I built my new machine at the start of the year. I was speaking to Internode about increasing my quota for a month to cover all the crap I’d have to re-download and the guy I spoke to told me about this, even sent me a link in the event I couldn’t find it via a search. THAT’s the kind of service you rarely get anywhere else!
Or just go into settings and select the internode Australian server (Same goes for Westnet, iiNet, etc. They are all under the iiNet banner aka the iiBorg)
Without using an app to force it it only TRIES to use those servers. It will still use other servers if load is too much etc.
This is also what he said. Essentially, it’ll preference the Australian servers. It won’t guarantee sourcing the data from Australian servers if they’re at capacity, down, time out, etc.
Why not just backup your steamapps folder to another hard drive?
I was able to back some of it on my external, but, in hindsight, I should have bought a second one– I underestimated exactly how my I was backing up from elsewhere. I figured I’d get away with it because I kept the dvds for most of my stuff, except, I couldn’t find them when I needed them and only found them a few weeks after downloading everything. You know how it goes… Lesson learned for next time, I suppose.
I’d imagine the speed would be good, because at the moment I usually get 11-13mb/sec. It’s super fast off steam.
:O
People are still using metered internet?
…The clear majority, yes.
People are also still using 56k as well.
but only those on Abbott’s Internet =)
Yep, people who live far away from an exchange and use a RIM usually can only get metered internet because unmetered is incredibly overpriced.
Yeah it kinda suprises me when there’s companies offering unlimited ADSL2+ even in regional areas for $60 (or less?) – but if your usage is fairly low I guess it still makes sense.
Where I live (Melbourne suburb, 15kms from city):
I live 4kms from an exchange
My choices are:
– unlimited ADSL2+ with TPG for $59.95 per month, awesome, until you realise that living 4kms from the exchange nets you a grand total speed of (wait for it…) 440kb/s!!
or
– Bigpond cable extreme 200gb a month for $79.95, where I can get download speeds of up to 30Mb depending on the servers I can connect to and what I am downloading (ie AFL replay off the Bigpond site – 500Mb per quarter at 15-20 seconds max, unmetered)
Yeah so, sometimes the unlimited option isnt the best
Unlimited isn’t the bargain it seems because it usually comes with a trade-off in speed.
Well mine is fast enough to stream 1080p on youtube with no buffering. Anything else, I just account for a download taking some time, the speed has never really been an issue.
Mine says that there’s only a speed bump after I go over a certain limit. It’s definitely not the quickest tho’.
Well with 500gig i dont normally have to worry.
For some reason It’s better not using it for me.
Tried downloading steam limiter but my anti virus software considers it a virus and deletes it. :/
I personally find the Malaysian servers a hell of a lot faster.
I’ve never managed to get any sort of ‘Steam filter’ to work, but then again I don’t really have to.
Luckily I don’t have to worry about this, for now. 5MB/s download at a minimum, with the other option being 100MBps. 😀
I’ve used an alternative to this in the past – it modified my hosts file and worked great.