Indeed, I am on 100Mbps fibre (unlimited downloads) and considering going up to 250Mbps as it is only slightly more expensive. I do have 1Gbps available from my ISP but the cost of that is prohibitive.
Though it is partially what you are used to. My workplace connects via a 10Gbps ATM so downloads at work are almost instant unless the server at the other end is slow, which kind of spoils me when I am forced to use slower connections.
I have unlimited and 450Mbps download speed. So it only takes minutes to do downloads. But there are still places with very slow internet speed. I wonder where @FlexyModem lives that has such slow speed. That seems like very slow DSL speed.
Yes, I’ll make sure you let you know what I find.
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada… I am a Rogers customer… 
Anywhere rural and on wireless will be slow, satellite is fast-ish downloads but slow uploads, any place that is using copper in the mix will be slow compared to fibre all the way to the premises. ( 5G is being touted as the new solution to fast internet, but full speed 5G will only be practical in large cities you are going to need a tower every few hundred metres)
It’s not speed that @FlexyModern is concerned about, it’s the size. ISPs can give you 200mbit/s but if the monthly data cap is like 125GB it is pretty useless.
I’ve seen the sim itself use 50GB to stream the Bing Data in a month, add a 20-40GB update on too of it and you’ve used basically all of your data for the month.
I lived in a rural area in ~2011-2014 where I first had satellite internet with a 400MB/day data cap and later had 4G wireless with 40GB/month. It’s painful and especially in the US our rural broadband rollout has been quite backwards.
I live in a city of 530,000 (ish) people, its not rural, its just really bad internet…
I guess MS and Asobo don’t take updates when thye update these figures. From the 1st of the month, this display claims I have only downloaded 7.96GIB, which seems way too low!
I’m surprised by your DSL speed considering the city size. I sure understand your frustration.
Don’t you have access to a provider going through cable instead?
I am on cable… extra …
my packages reside here, C:\Users\Matteo\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache\Packages
then there are two folders beneath that, ‘community’ and ‘Official’ is this the right spot for the update folder?
I believe so yes.
So here’s what I found with this Sim Update:
I installed the update, fully updated my aircraft in Content Manager, and then used ‘rdiffdir’ which is part of the duplicity backup suite to generate a binary diff between the pre-update state ‘A’ and the current state ‘B’. This diff file can then be transferred to another computer and used to turn ‘A’ → ‘B’. These are pretty standard algorithms for minimizing network use when updating files on remote servers, rsync has used them for decades. (Useage example here: http://incise.org/syncing-non-networked-computers-with-rdiffdir.html)
Size of download vis MSFS: 7.97GB (‘welcome’ screen) + 0.8 GB (content manager) = 8.77 GB
Size of ‘rdiffdir’ diff file: 1.6GB
So using an rsync type algorithm to do this update would have saved ~81% of the download size.
There are people in many parts of the world or rural areas with total data transfer caps that might want to keep their sim updated but fly with the network features turned off, so in my mind keeping the size of the “must download” updates to the minimum possible is an important goal to keeping the sim accessible to as many customers as possible. It’s clear from this initial exploration that with a different implementation, significant update size could be saved.
It’s possible the % change might be different for an update with more binary files in it like a World Update. I’ll do some more investigation next month with World Update 4.
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