Steam - Valve's best move yet?

@ 2004/09/14
With the third phase of the preloading of Half-Life 2, many are finding that Valve Software's Steam Delivery System is proving a heck of a lot more reliable than it has done in the past. After being almost flamed out of existence a year ago, Steam lives on and is, apparently, holding up to the task of giving gamers what might just be the game of the year. What's going on?

Comment from jmke @ 2004/09/14
Valve #16 is the "fattest" of them all, and it's in the EU?
Comment from DUR0N @ 2004/09/14
well, the increased the bandwith on most servers, that helped a lot

http://www.steampowered.com/status/content_servers.html

in europe, the NGZ-Server.de #2 was the best server around, bandwidth wise. And now, most of the valve content server have the same amount of bandwidth as the NGZ server