My biggest irritation with Steam downloading things isn't that it's slow, but that it uses many TCP connections simultaneously. There is no way to restrict how many connections are being used concurrently. This use of many connections slightly increases the throughput when there's available bandwidth, but much-more-problematically, if one's Internet connection is saturated, it tends to result in Steam slurping up all the available bandwidth and starving other things, since normally, if an Internet connection is saturated, bandwidth tends to roughly be apportioned with an even amount of throughput given to each TCP connection. Programs using many connections tend to starve other bandwidth consumers. Steam downloading is a noninteractive, background thing, so it is pretty much always preferable to me to have that back off if I want to have a video stream or something going on; if I could restrict Steam to using a single TCP connection, I would.
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