My speed increased tenfold after I turned on a VPN to Texas.
Thank you for this god-tier advice.
As for MS, this doesn’t give me much faith in Azure. Or they’re being a typical Silicon Valley company and not really caring about anywhere that isn’t the US. It’s taken me 6 hours to do 20GB. Normally that would take me 30 minutes.
Yeah no kidding! I’m in the UK and I turned my VPN to Southampton and my download speed shot straight up from 0.23Mbits/a to 23Mbits/s.
Great call on texas… went from 15-20 for LA to 70-100 in dallas 
Up to 140 now. Wow
Here in Canada was downloading at 0.23mbps turned on my VPN to the US and now downloading at 130mbps. What the hell is going on here? Thanks for the awesome tip though man.
Great call! Thanks for this.
There was a thread on the MSFS forums where it was shown that ISPs were throttling the traffic for game updates such as MSFS. Using a vpn will fix this…if true. Also, if true, not the fault of MS /Azure
cool, how do you do it?
Can confirm that it improves download speed dramatically, but it’s still too slow.
I’m using NordVPN and I tried a normal server in Dallas and a P2P server in New York. I’m in Italy. I’m currently downloading fs-base-cgl-0.1.17
- Without VPN 0.16Mbps
- Dallas normal VPN 7.5Mbps
- New York P2P VPN 10-11Mbps
EDIT: UK servers give me 30MbpsIt started strong and then slowed down to 0.12Mbps after 2 minutes
My connection is 50Mbps.
I also noticed that some packages were saturating my connection while others were never going above 15Mbps. fs-base-cgl-0.1.17 for some reason is really slow to download, which is a shame considering it’s the biggest package to download (I think).
I’m in Dallas and it’s shit
my god went from 7mb/s to 200mb/s
New York Is working fast rn, i currently live in the city too. im surprised i didnt have to change states
I wish there was a definitive answer to why one must use a VPN to get better download speeds. 1GB Google Fiber in the US. I usually sit around 2-3Mbps for MSFS downloads. Connecting to any US VPN location brings my download speeds up to 50-60Mbps, which still isn’t great, but WTF is going on?! Been this way since MSFS was first released. IDK if it’s ISP related, Azure related, who knows.
There’s also something to be said, server/network-wise, about the amount of concurrent connections vs bandwidth being served. More connections can mean more drive thrashing (if they’re using HDDs), increased queue depth, and increased random IO. Just serve us the files sequentially and drop the connection!
If Steam can handle millions of users downloading massive games at launch at the full speed clients can handle, MS can handle it too. I’ve never had Steam not saturate my 1GB connection when downloading. Even on launch days.
Also having those sorts of download speeds (on a gigabit connection. Don’t have a VPN and i need to go to bed soon, so will probably just cancel everything and start again tomorrow after work. God i hate Azure. Fucking awful servers.
Download speed is the least significant factor in why the installation/updates take so long.
It’s because the updater downloads each individual file, decompresses it, then continues to the next instead of just downloading everything at once and doing all the decompression at the end.
It’s to ease the load on their servers at the expense of their game taking 5 hours to install even on a gigabit connection.
Try putting it to America. I’m guessing the UK/EU has shit severs.
You’re welcome have fun
Try this also buddy:
1- Open your windows CMD as Administrator
2- Enter this command and press enter:
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal
3- It will display an “Ok.” when everything is done.
Might also be worth trying this
It definitely improved things for me. That plus VPNing to US will probably net you some pretty significant down speed gains.
Maybe in some cases, but not for me. The main issue for me has always been the download speed, which is displayed in the launcher.
Yesterday the 1st 20GB took me 6 hours, which fluctuated between 0.2mbps and 20mbps. After running the command I’ve linked elsewhere, restarting and VPNing to the US (faster servers) I did the remaining 20GB in around 25 minutes.
I’m not saying that the constant acquiring license > download > stop > decompress > stop > repeat isn’t an issue (because it is), but it’s a very small drop in a very large ocean compared to the download speed issues.