Download quotas have become more generous since Steam, Valve’s digital distribution client for games and software, was released. 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.
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
3 responses to “Ensure Steam Always Downloads From Australian Content Servers”
I’ve been using this for the last 6 months and it certainly seems to help but it doesn’t reduce metered usage to zero as I’d hoped. I’m curious to hear if others have had the same results. (my ISP adam internet is selected in both steam and the limiter)
As I understand the way steam’s servers are structured, the mirrors don’t have everything on them but instead focus mostly on things that are new and/or popular. Downloading older or more obscure titles would mean it’d have to fetch data from the main server & still count against your quota
I get much better speeds from Steam’s american servers then I do the Australian unmetered option for me on Bigpond.