Due to appalling download speeds in the last few weeks/months, I am seriously considering boycotting the purchase of any games above a certain file size ... over 10 Gb maybe.

What else can I do really?
I've got better things to do with my PC time.

GOG either don't want to spend the money on providing the necessary servers, while at the same time happy to take our money, or they are deliberately reducing the speed of non Galaxy downloads ... though I have seen complaints about Galaxy download speeds.

For most of my time with GOG I have been able to download at between 4 to 5 MB/s, whereas in recent times I am lucky if I even get 2 Mb/s, usually more like 1.6 to 1.8 Mb/s these days.

On a really good day (or moment) I might get as much as 3 Mb/s for a while.

I try at various times through the day and night, plus reconnects to my ISP. None of it makes any difference.

And yes, I still get fast downloads elsewhere, so the issue is clearly at the GOG end.

It's not good enough to use the old sales excuse, because GOG always have a sale happening. So there isn't a quiet time anymore, and some sales are a clearly worse time when it comes to downloading.

Many like me download to archive, and do that as soon as a purchase has occurred. We want that sense of security and comfort, and I'm certainly not going to wait days or weeks for an elusive better time to download.

It's entirely possible that it's a regional thing as I've seen no slowdowns here. When you say 4-5MB/s down to 1.7-2.0Mb/s do you mean your speeds have halved or do you mean 4-5 MegaBYTE (32-40 MegaBIT/s) down to 1.6 MegaBIT/s which is quite a bit more drastic. Is it just GOG or does it also happen on other stores / websites, online speed testers work OK, anyone else here from Australia / NZ having issues, etc?

Agree with AB2012; I'm in the UK and I haven't seen any differences in recent months between download speeds on GoG and other services. It does feel like it could be regional.

Maybe time to contact Support and/or your ISP?

I haven’t really been noticing any slowdowns, but then I have been boycotting since Nov last year due to a huge list of reasons, none of which have been addressed, or even acknowledged:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/boycotting_gog_2021

Do you happen to have access to a vpn service? If yes maybe try to connect to a server in Western US or Europe and check gog downloadspeeds then.

Might just be lots of concurrent downloads. Maybe there's a peak time you could avoid. Try different times of the day?

I've noticed a big slowdown as well in past months. Used to take around 20 minutes to download a 4GB offline backup file, now it takes an hour or more.

Slow downloads in Australia? That never happens.

Been getting good speeds myself on GOG.

However as many have said it can be a number of reasons that are not even related to GOG, This time last year I was having issues downloading from GOG however it turned out that the company that owned the lines to my house were sending pulses through the system to disrupt 3rd party providers.

I had slow download speeds for a while now also.

The solution I found, was to use the following steps. (I'm using Google Chrome)

1. Type “chrome://flags” without the quotes in the address bar to bring up the experimental browser settings for Chrome.

2. Type "parallel" without the quotes in the search bar on the page and look for the parallel download setting and change it to "Enable" in the drop-down menu.

3. Close and restart your browser for the settings to take effect.

This brought my speed back to the normal 3-4 minutes per 4gb bin file. Though for the first few seconds the time will show 15+ minutes, but then will go down to 3-4 minutes.

As far as I know, this is not a 3rd party program, but your internal Chrome browser setting page. Perhaps someone can help clarify this.

If you do a search using whatever search engine you prefer and type in google flags, you'll find a few sites recommending certain flags either to enable or to disable. Do use caution though, as most, if not all of these settings are experimental according to Google.

I only touched the parallel downloads one and it's been the best decision I made and it appears to be a very stable one.
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I have a 50 Megabit connection, which means I can get slightly over 5 Megabytes a second if a site I download from allows it. So yes my downloading speed from GOG has more than halved in recent times ... closer to a third of what I should be getting.

As I said in my first post, I am not experiencing this elsewhere, just at GOG and only in the last month or so.

And as I also stated I have tried at various times through the day and night, due to likely regional favoritism.

I suspect lack of servers and favoritism to where most customers lie ... USA, China, United Kingdom, etc. I also suspect the possibility that non Galaxy downloading is penalized.
Thanks for the info, but I am not using a browser. I am using a program that uses the GOG SDK ... the same program that was working fine before this slowdown started ... and I've not updated it since well before ... so nothing has changed my end.

Like I said in my first post, I have tried that, and that has always been my approach, especially during big sales.

To solve the issue of concurrent downloads, GOG needs to provide more servers.

Maybe GOG have a lot more customers now (i.e China etc), and there really is no off-peak period anymore.

Normal speed here on Argentina.

Not sure about the last 7 months, but Australia has slightly more users than China here in terms of revenue. So I don't think that's the reason.

You can also test and compare your hypothesis by using Galaxy and comparing speeds with your browser. I understand the paranoia of telemetry. But Piotr and Oleg went on the record to say the telemetry they collect won't be shared with third parties.

Anyway, the only people who can actually answer your question are GOG staff and other Aussies and Kiwis to see where your nearest servers are and inquire if they're having issues. Might be worth befriending them when they respond to this thread for future regional checks.