G’day guys. Look, you really have to be a ‘bit’ careful when talking about computer memory size and download speeds otherwise it will end up ‘byteing’ you. lolol But seriously, here is a quick note clarify the right way to show memory and download info.
A bit is the smallest size of computer memory, it is written as a lowewr case ‘b’.
A byte is simply 8 bits. A byte is written as an upper case ‘B’
So. b = bit, smallest unit of memory, and 8 bits is a B = byte
All the rest is just describing how many b (bits) or B *(bytes) there are.
To do this we us a prefix in front of the b or B. The case (upper or lower) of these letters is VERY important!
Example: m stands for milli which means ‘one thousandth’. If we write mb to describe how much memory there is, it means there is one thousandth of a bit. Since one bit is the smallest unit of memory, (like one penny or one cent) it is impossible to get 1000th of it. In short, we never use lower case ‘m’ in this subject. Letter case matters!
Here are the prefixes and values we use wit b and B.
k = kilo = one thousand
(many people use K here instead of k, even some websites, but k is the correct term)
M = Mega = one thousand times k (kilo)
G = Giga = one thousand times M (Mega)
T = Terra = one thousand times G (Giga)
and on it goes, each one thousand times larger than the last.
P = Peta, E = Exa, Z = Zetta, Y = Yotta
When we talk about memory, we are generally saying how much RAM we have, how big our hard drive is etc… but when we talk about download speed, we are still talking about how much memory, but it is how much memory we can move from one place to another EVERY SECOND
REMEMBER:
8b = 1B so 8Gb of RAM is only 1GB of RAM…
My download speed was 500MB/s (/s = per second). That means you are downloading 1GB (GigaByte) of data every seconds. (I WISH!) More likely it was 500Mb/s
Lastly, mind your B-b’s and never use ‘m’.
■■■■ it’s a novel. Hope it helps someone, because there are a LOT of ‘funny values’ in all the comments above. Cheers
I have tried EVERY tip in here. Nothing helped…
Midwest USA here. This is absolutely insane. I have also tried everything. Every single thing.
I am on a gigabit connection (ethernet, not wifi), and yet, I always cap out @ 4Mb/s. That’s megabits! Literally anything I download, whether its on Steam or elsewhere averages around 80-90 MB/sec. Literally the only reasoning I can gather here is Microsoft/Asobo are capping certain ISPs, or the downloads get severely bottle-necked based on location. As suggested elsewhere, this was ONLY remedied by using ProtonVPN, although that only gets me to about 40MB/sec.
I really don’t know what this issue is, or why it has been years without a real solution… but here I am as well 
Again if its faster with a VPN then without, then it has something to do with your provider. You need to contact them with this information. At which point they will either correct it, confirm it, or deny it.
If they deny it, you will have to become a network engineer, and gather corresponding evidence to prove it, and then convince them what and where the issues lie.
If your in the states there are new laws that make the ISP’s nervous, so it may / should be easier. If your not in the states then your on your own.
For me I documented and called for months, and after I sent them my evidence, I mentioned that I might print it out and pass it around to the other residents of the bldgs I live in. All of a sudden they admitted that there was a problem, and doubled everyone DL speeds, which with the high latency issue here, actually makes the problem worse LOL ;p
Me too. Getting 300 megabits/second on speedtest. 5 on Flight Simulator. First time player here so I don’t have access to the settings for download speed, and I’ve tried various fixes in this thread like turning off IPv6, but it’s not working. Every time I restart my computer to apply a fix, the download has to start from the beginning, which if I could have my actual internet speed wouldn’t be a big deal.
I’m glad I’m here for the $1 game pass months because if I’d paid $60 for this I’d be furious. I guess I’ll let it download when I got on vacation next week. This is kinda embarrassing for Microsoft.
THANKS!
I would like to emphasize the the thing that worked for me was turning optimization to disabled and then BACK to normal.
One thing i could have added to the part about optimisation being changed was it may be worth rebooting after you have made the change.
I didn’t need to, but on some systems it only seems to work after a reboot.
Hey, My location: Germany, 300k internet line
What i tried:
Normal download (no VPN or other) only 10-20Mbits/s.
Using a VPN (Cyberghost VPN) trying different servers (Amsterdam etc) No improvement!
IPv6 Off no improvement.
IPv6 off+ VPN = I was able to download at more than 70 Mbits/s which is a significant improvement. I then tried other VPN servers such as Amsterdam, France, Sweden etc. But I had the best result with the Frankfurt VPN server.
I hope this helps one or the other. Btw Extremely sad that Microsoft hasn’t fixed anything there until today!
It’s hard to tell what is the answer to slow downloads since su5 came out.I have the same problem on a 600 mb/s xfinity network. Shouldn’t ms fix this for us since this is the only game that suffers here. from this thread what is the fix?
I am just amazed how microsoft is capable of such unoptimalized downloads for couple of years now, since day one i had slow downloads on dual wan load balanced connection with theoretical speeds of 2Gbps/1.3Gpbs, downloading on a nvme drive on system with overclocked ryzen 9 and yet it’s only downloading 60Mbit/s, i dont get it how can such a big company ■■■■ up such a simple task …
After months and months of trying to fix this problem and improve photogrammetry, I finally got it fixed.
Network Hardware
For a long time, I had a standard off-the-shelf WIFI router with my cable modem plugged into it. Worked OKAY, was able to utilize my 600mb connection without too much trouble. But I consistently had issues with poor photogrammetry and slow download speed, either on wifi or hardware. Connected directly to the modem didn’t help either. Like most, I pointed at MS because everything else was OKAY.
My router finally died, so I upgraded my whole house network with a business class WIFI6 AP and a PFsense-based x86 router.
The combination of those two things + using Google’s DNS servers ratcheted my download speeds up to the MAX connection speed my router is shaping too.
Traffic Shaping and Bufferbloat
Un-filtered / limited, I would get very inconstant performance in bufferbloat tests. Run-2-run would vary a lot and my RTT and RTTsd on my modem would increase rapidly. Speed tests were always good, HD streaming was always good, Steam downloads good MSFS performance, not so much.
With PFSENSE I have limiters running FC_CODEL at ~80% of my max bandwidth. Bufferbloat tests are A - A+ consistently, and in-game I see streaming speeds in excess of 300, and download speeds also in excess of 250.
My personal conclusion
In my case, with a cable-based ISP @ 600mbs advertised, bufferbloat is INDEED the cause for my overall performance, and upgrading my network hardware so that I can properly shape traffic and limit speeds to prevent overloading ISP was key.
I know this is not a feasible solution for everyone, but it seems MS servers are very sensitive to buffering and loaded latency and choice of DNS.
Based on this thread, there is no silver bullet solution for sure, this is just my experience.
Current Performance:
For me, using Cloudflare Warp fixed the issue. Search for it or go to url 1.1.1.1
I tried all the tips on this page and other without any luck.
Following these steps, turning off ipv6 protocol, changing ipv4 dns servers to Google, as well changing my r7000 router dns servers to Google did the trick! Thanks!
So I have been having these same issues. The first download about a month ago or so was fine. Took all night but fine. I just tried updating to the Beta version yesterday and now I am only getting 2Mbits/s. I have restarted routers, changed DNS servers, used Cloudfare Warp, VPNs, everything. The only item having issues downloading is MSFS. I restarted my computer just now after leaving it on for 24 hours and only downloading 10gigs in MSFS. I was able to install the Xplane 12 demo (10gigs) in the time the MSFS only downloaded 300MB. What the heck is going on?
Thank you EL Professor, it works on my side, was at only 14 mbits since hours before reading this post and now getting to 200Mbits in less than 10 minutes and it’s still increasing! That’s not magic, that’s your sharing! 
Always seems to work for anyone I’ve seen with the slow download issues.
Obviously more than one cause at work here. Glad to be of assistance 
Nice! Very odd how easy it is to fix, but why can´t Asobo change something on there end. The Internet is full with recent complaints.
I’m having the same problem with the download speed. I have tried VPN (ExpressVPN) and Windows Delivery optimisation but still no Luck. On MSFS I get a maximum 8 Mbit/s speed but downloading with other apps (steam) I get 20 times this speed. I can’t access my router to change the setting there but is there any other way I can fix this? I live in Norway if that matters.
Hi there,
Just change the ‘Country or Region’ setting under the Time & Language/Language & Region in Windows 11, to another country other than the current one. You can choose a country geographically close to you and you are sure that country has good internet infrastructure.
You must reboot your computer before launching MSFS
In my case, I am in Turkey and that setting was set to Turkey. I’ve changed it to Germany and the download speed was may be 10x faster.
Azure has been a catastrophe for Microsoft Flight Simulator, I really want Microsoft to use Steam to host the game files, their servers are always fast and have no issues unlike this silly downloader.