Just installed Proton VPN and choose a location where it’s currently in the middle of the night (less network saturation).
Results: Download speeds increased from a crawling 0-1 Mbps to a whooping 130 Mbps.
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Switched to a US server on my VPN and got better speeds so there is some stupid throttling going on in EU.
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Where is the server you chose? I had tried NYC with Surfshark and it didn’t help at all.
exactally this, it may be worse and affecting more people now, but some had this issue pretty much since launch
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In the January Dev Livestream, they said that they are aware of a problem of cache of their CDN provider (PlayFab), but the person that asked the questions of slow download speed was refering to the content manager downloads if I can remember well. Anyway, the issue is the same, I hope that it’s gonna be fixed finally.
I can’t imagine spending 2 days of downloads for MSFS2024 if it’s like 400Gb of download, at a speed of 2Mbit/s 
I am currently trying to download that new Dune plane. 4.52 GB download, has been going for 1.5 hours now (gigabit internet). This is ridiculous, very sad and angering that they think that the quality of this service is enough.
It clearly is, judging by what MS/Asobo themselves said.
They also said they had fixed it, which they clearly haven’t, so…
If you use a VPN, and land on the right CDN server you will see better speeds. If it was just a client side issue the VPN would make no difference, but a lot of users report that it does, including myself.
It’s not a magical fix. Sometimes it makes no, or little difference, but others you can go from 2Mbps, to over 200Mbps.
Plus, look at the incident report where they wrote about the issues with SU13, and SU14 downloads. At no point did they mention it was a client side issue, and all the mitigations, and tweaks they made were all server side.
I’m just looking for a link to that text…have a look at the post incident report. There was a bug on the server side, issues with SAS token generation, and they ended up throttling users to 1/8th of normal parallel connections.
After all that, their impression is that everything has returned to normal. And here we are with 2Mbps download speeds >90% of the time.
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My impression is the sim is a victim of its own success. At least for the launch days there are simply too many clients connecting at the same time.
As you say, I’ve used many different DRM systems, from Valve, Ubisoft, EA, GoG, countless MMO’s, and none of them have been plagued with issues like this.
When I raised a question about this on the PlayFab support site, it was never published, and deemed “inappropriate”.
If I had to guess, this is an internal corporate thing. Kind of like where one department will bill another, the MSFS team may not be able to request/demand additional capacity in Azure, and we are all fighting over the scraps of what is available. 
I have no horse in this race, so happy to be proven wrong, but I’ll eat the hat I don’t own if they fix this with a client update.
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That’s what I find so frustrating about all this.
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What I found frustrating is that I can’t understand why MS won’t sack this CDN provider, if they clearly not providing a sufficient service.
PlayFab is now owned by Microsoft, since 2018.
I just watched a couple of smaller downloads. I saw the same behavior for all of them. They started slow, but got faster the further they progressed. One download even looked like the download speed was 1/2 * progress bar state.
Check this out:
Here’s another one. It seems like this package consists of multiple parts, the download of each part starts slowly and then accelerates rapidly once a certain threshold is reached.
It seems to be quite stable to reproduce. I guess there’s something broken with the throtteling either on client or on server side.
It’s really a shame this gets such a low priority.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sQGchnJlzk (available in 20 minutes)
I have an 1000/1000 MBit/s connection. Effectivly I can get 800 MBit/s with SpeedTest.
I’ve had to reinstall, but are getting NOWHERE with the Content Manager download with only 2.5 MBit/s download speed. That is like less than ½ % of my bandwidth! - That is ONE HALF OF ONE PROCENT of my bandwidth.
Microsoft, you need to do better!
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Fellow simmers, that use Proton.
Do you use the free or paid version?
Is Xbox Pass free download version considered free?
I built a new PC over Christmas. i714700k, 4TB nvme Gen 4 game drive with a WD 850X 1TB nvme Gen 4 for OS drive. High end Gigabyte MB, 48GB Trident Z memory running at 7200 and an evga FTW 3080ti.
My downloads have been better. Nowhere near where they should be, but better.
For contrast, on my old pc, a 20GB steam download would take about 10-15 minutes. Now the same update takes maybe 30-40 seconds. That’s download, patch and verification. I have 1gb x 100mb fiber.
MSFS loads in about a minute. I have not tried the Caribbean update.
This is 100% a MS/Asobo problem. I have no other issues with downloads from anywhere. It’s a shame that you cant get the core updates from Steam. It is smokin’ fast.
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Max speed was close to 2Mbit/s here today.
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Sam results here in PNW. Would be nice if MS would just update this the same way DCS offers updates via Torrent. Time to stop this dance all Microsoft is doing at this point is losing customers given that seems to be the biggest complaint.
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