It would be a great help if we could get them something reproducible. The hit and miss nature drives me crazy, and would be near impossible to debug.

The connection itself doesn't seem to make a difference. Last night I played with a coworker. He was hosting on his laptop (in a vm!), playing on ...

Durandle wrote:Sometimes it gets halfway and suddenly jumps speed up to 3MB/sec and finishes in seconds. Really wacky!

Do you know of any servers I could test that on? If it picks up eventually then maybe everyone wont completely hate me haha.
At this point I just listen and play singleplayer

We get this from time to time too on our server. Most people have decent internet and will connect all the time and sometimes he downloads like 20 Kbps at that point he closes factorio and reopens and it's fine. Not sure why the heck it happens but it happens.

This is happening now on other ...

your actual download bandwidth, and your peer's upload bandwidth :).
Maybe providing logs would help to diagnose if there is a problem or not.

I tested my download speed before and after multiple attempts to join the server, and the server itself was sending the map to other people who were ...

For those in the know, the youtube user Bluedrake42 just jumped on board the factorio train! Given his predisposition to multiplayer, he got an experimental developer pvp build.

His server is working fine, but when I try to connect my download rate which is normally 1.5 Mbps drops to below 1.5 kbps ...