While most Australians are aware that the country's net infrastructure is lagging several years behind the rest of the Western world, Steam has rubbed salt in the wound by offering regularly updated statistics on the best and worst performing ISPs in each region.
At a time when most PC users have transitioned to digital purchases, in concert with many blockbuster games demanding upwards of 20GB downloads, it's never been more obvious that Australia's internet services are in dire need of attention.
While the country waits for some warped form of the NBN to be built and delivered, some new data from Steam download stats indicated just how disappointing things are.
It's a numbers game
According to the figures, the TransACT infrastructure offers the highest average download rate in Australia at 9Mbps, while M2 offers the lowest at 4.3Mbps. Keep in mind that these are average download rates, with ISPs predominantly used in metropolitan likely to receive better averages.
Still, when compared with Comcast in the United States, which boasts an average of 25.8Mbps, even the better performers in Australia are clearly lagging. The worst performing ISP in the United States, CenturyLink, offers a 6.8Mbps average, which only a smidgeon lower than Telstra's.
According to the stats, Australians have downloaded 1.5 Petabytes worth of data over the last seven days, compared to 16.8PB in the United States.
- If only Australia had an NBN. Find out what's happening with the National Broadband Network.
