I have a 1Gb fibre connection.

When I try to load MSFS2024 from my UK location and IP address, I get a really poor server speed.  However, when I use my VPN and pretend to be in North America, wham, instant download of everything pretty much.

Anyone else experiencing dire server speeds to the UK?

If you select US server instead of UK manually, you get lower speed without the VPN?

No I`m on full fibre but I think it also depends on the time of day and internet traffic in your area. If you do a search you will find traffic goes through main hubs positioned in the UK. In the south traffic is higher.

I can also confirm that I get better server speeds connecting from the USA via VPN than I do fromthe UK.  Download speeds have been really poor here for a while now, noticable from the time it takes to load in a flight and for blurry cockpits to clear as well as downloading photogrammetry (which is far blurrier than it was a few weeks ago with the same settings).

 

Speedtest by Ookla - The Global Broadband Speed Test

Mine goes through Ilkley. but you can test another server.

Remember to test throughput and not just speeds

 

Regards

Openreach NOC Engineer 👍

I'm on 1Gb in the UK and get lightening speeds (it's one of the reasons I deleted all the content that I initially downloaded, from MS2024 SU3 - there was just no benefit as the streaming works so well).  

Now Orbx Central........ that's an another matter.   I will typically see 15 mins per Gb when downloading from their Flintstones servers!

My speeds didn't used to be this good but I changed from a BT product to "YouFibre" and the effective performance just exploded. Odd, considering the external hardware is the same.    I do think routers and local hardware can make a big difference.    BT used cheap disposable Chinese boxes.  The new provider's boxes and router is much more heavy duty.

YMMV.

Edited November 7, 2025Nov 7 by JYW

Never use a VPN through Steam, otherwise it can be trouble.

14 hours ago, kevinfirth said:

I have a 1Gb fibre connection.

When I try to load MSFS2024 from my UK location and IP address, I get a really poor server speed.  However, when I use my VPN and pretend to be in North America, wham, instant download of everything pretty much.

Anyone else experiencing dire server speeds to the UK?

Try to manually use a different DNS server in your windows netork settings.

Some providers systematically throttle access to certain websites (in Germany it's Deutsche Telekom that throttles accss to MS Flight Simulator servers).

By using a different DNS server (in Germany we usually use Cloudflare) you should get the full bandwidth back.
The effect is essentially the same as using a VPN: You circumvent the DNS server that throttles access to your target site.

According to my google lookup and my past experience managing DNS servers, they don't generally throttle traffic, but a slow or inefficient DNS server can cause a delay in address resolution. While DNS doesn't impact your actual download or upload speeds, a slow resolution process means there's a longer wait before the content from a website can start to download. In contrast, a fast DNS server can make webpages feel faster to load.  

10 hours ago, Ojisan_alpha said:

Try to manually use a different DNS server in your windows netork settings.

Some providers systematically throttle access to certain websites (in Germany it's Deutsche Telekom that throttles accss to MS Flight Simulator servers).

By using a different DNS server (in Germany we usually use Cloudflare) you should get the full bandwidth back.
The effect is essentially the same as using a VPN: You circumvent the DNS server that throttles access to your target site.

That's useful info thanks, but I'll have to look into it...wouldn't have the faintest idea how to do that for now...

Changed it to cloudflare, now testing to see if that makes a difference w/o the VPN 🙂

Edited November 8, 2025Nov 8 by kevinfirth
update

21 hours ago, hanhamreds said:

Remember to test throughput and not just speeds

What’s the best way to do that?  I’ve been having internet speed issues lately (generally not just with MSFS) and when I run speed tests it comes back as being 1gb/s, which it’s sure not in reality.

5 hours ago, regis9 said:

What’s the best way to do that?  I’ve been having internet speed issues lately (generally not just with MSFS) and when I run speed tests it comes back as being 1gb/s, which it’s sure not in reality.

Often it's the facility that's serving content.  Slow connection on their end, congestion between them and you and many other factors.  Run a trace route "tracert" to the distant site.  The timing of each hop will give you an idea of the location of the delay.

Another problem which probably doesn't occur often with today's hardware if a duplex issue.  Most systems run full duplex which means that hand shakes and data are going back and forth at the same time.  If for some reason, your connection has degraded itself to half-duplex,  data transmission speeds are really slow.