Just made a post called "Why Does Steam Destroy My Internet?" but this might be a good place to get answers...

I get that the holiday sale (and DDOS?) is making things run slowly, but I'm really baffled by why Steam seems to make my entire Internet unusable.

I was hoping to fool around in GTAV's open world during the winter break. I bought it on Friday, and started downloading. It went up to 1.5MB, then slowly went down to under 100kb and stayed there. Every hour or two, the connection would drop and I'd have to restart Steam.

While Steam is on, even at 100kb download rate, none of the other computers connected to our network can do anything on the Internet. The autosave on blogger constantly fails, google hangs forever, and forget youtube or netflix. I tried only turning it on overnight, but it drops the connection an hour in.

This morning I opened an old torrent and let it re-download a 4GB movie. It downloaded in about thirty minutes, upwards of 5MB per second, and I went on reddit and looked at videos the whole time with no lag.

I already spent the weekend trying to fix things. I changed my DNS info, reconfigured Steam, and tried downloading from a different country (TY Greece and UAE!), but could only get speeds from 100-400kb, and couldn't do anything else while Steam was running.

I'm getting the sense that this is a big issue for a lot of people, but no one seems to have a solution that works. It's been 3 days, and GTAV is still at 40%. I know that it's a 40GB file , but I could have downloaded it five times over if I wanted to pirate it, and used the Internet while I did it.

What the actual fuck? Is this just the way that things are going to be? Is there a competing client that actually works for downloading big games? Since I already paid for GTAV, can I pirate it and then move it into the Steam folder and play it through Steam? I know that's a crazy question but it's feeling less and less ridiculous the longer this drags on.