Does Steam bottleneck speeds at times?

Downloading 18 gigs of halflife ATM, I normally max speed out at 3mbs, but all of a sudden it went to 100kbs. I noticed a drop in speed late in my skyrim DLoad too. Does steam start capping speed on larger files, or do the servers slow that much during high traffic? Nothing has changed on my end.

Anyway, just curious if anyone knew how steam does their server speed. Thanky you for your time.

A lot of traffic. I got lucky earlier when I was at work and I installed games using my phone and they seemed to have gone a good dl speed as they were installed in a good amount of time. But since I've been home which was about 5pm it's back to the normal 150-300 kb/s for me. It's all good though since I got enough to play at the moment.

I'm back bouncing between 2 to 3mbs. I'm happy again.

They don't do it on purpose. It is just when the big sales come there are so many people downloading, the download servers can't keep up. Last year I actually switched it to Japan and actually got better speeds, it was so slow in the US at the time. The speeds get worse as the week goes on. Lots of people don't start downloading immediately. It takes a few days before everyone is downloading.