The bottleneck is typically at the server level, not the pipe. Steam uses BitTorrent, which is built to parallelize downloads - effectively implementing what d

The bottleneck is typically at the server level, not the pipe. Steam uses BitTorrent, which is built to parallelize downloads - effectively implementing what download managers do. I think Firefox these days also does clever stuff behind the scenes. The result is downloads that complete faster than before, even though the theoretical max speed of any given connection is the same. Download managers are somewhat old-fashioned simply because modern software learnt from them and now tries their tricks out of the box.