Client Download

[SSimpson]

I've only had to restart my client download like 10 times because the data transfer rate drops below .5 MB/s. Once I restart, it goes up above 3.4 MB/s which is much more doable but after 10 mins, it drops below .5 again.

I think someone on the IT side needs to check into this and boost that bandwidth so it stays upwards of 3 MB/s.

I've tested my download speed and I've gotten over 70 Mb/s so it's not my computer and it's not my internet speed, therefore, leaving the source of the client to be the problem.

[Raist]

Either something else is consuming bandwidth locally or along your route, or something is otherwise affecting throughput along the path. Just downloaded the client at a full 1.9MB/sec, which is right at my plan's bandwidth cap (16Mbps). Same thing happens whenever I get the patches too...but that is from an Akamai mirror. Didn't check to see if the client comes from a mirror also or not though. I followed the link I got when I searched for "Client Download" through the FAQ section off the Lodestone's Help & Support drop menu. Ultimately it lead to this page (North America client):

http://www.finalfantasyxiv.com/playersdownload/na/

Even if you are getting throttled somehow along the route, it is still coming at broadband speeds....roughly 4Mbps (one megabyte is just under 8.4 million bits). If you let it run it might pick back up once the congested condition clears, or you could try again during a more off-peak time frame...unless your ISP may be pulling the old TWC trick where they give you the full bandwidth at the start of a download and then scale it back after a certain amount is pulled down. Might even be scaling you back because it's been flagged to a lower priority by their shaping rules for that matter (not detecting it as a media stream or maybe they suspect it's a torrent or something odd like that).

Edit: Looks like it is indeed pointing to an off-site mirror, Akamai in fact (gdl.square-enix.com is a server hosted by Akamai, based out of Cambridge, MA--and they have very robust hosting for their servers).

Edit 2: Should also note that if you are seeing this during the patching phase, it may be because your download has basically stopped while a patch is unpacked and installed. They likely haven't put together a big rollup package yet, so you are going to be pulling down and installing mulitple patch files. In the past when there were mulitple patches to install it would pull a file down, unpack it, install it, then start pulling the next file and repeat the cycle until it finished. The download speed will go up and down during the appropriate phases because of the pausing and such.

The initial client download is only 109MB in size... we've had patches approaching Gigabyte sizes, and the install footprint since Beta4 is now up to over 14GB. It's a lot of update files to pull down, unpack, and register to get you to that point. You should see a reference to the patch being downloaded...there may be a sort of date stamp embedded in there so you can tell when you are getting close to the current patch level.

You may simply need to let it run it's course for a while.