Why are the Map downloads so slow?

In 3 years I've had a Garmin Satnav (GPS) I've always found map download speeds to be painfully slow. Yesterday, for example, my 50mbps fibre line was only receving the map download at 4mbps from Garmin with an estimated download time in excess of 8 hours. Now this successful download was the fourth attempt with previous tries freezing at 34.2%.  Overall, my downloading the maps quarterly, in 6 out of 12 times there is a problem with Garmin's servers or Garmin's system doesn't recognise the latest browers or " I'm sorry we have a problem our end which is known but not advertised here".   Most annoying is when the fault is usally that of Garmin, but Garmin is unable or unwilling to recognise it. So one feels it must be me or what am I doing wrong. It wastes hours of our time.  My opinion and conclusion is that Garmin doesn't allocate sufficent resources to testing updates before they are released. I know one business model is to put the best resources where maximum income will be generated. But that leaves owners of products in their twlight years (that's the devcies not the people) feeling deeply disatisfied. It's a shame becaue the product itslef is great.

Slow downloads historically have not been Garmin's fault.  In around 10 years of owning Garmins mine have always completed in less than an hour and recently (last few years) they've been in the order of less than 30 minutes. If it's taking several hours you need to closely examine how your system is downloading the updates, including speaking to your ISP as it's likely they are throttling the downloads.

This FAQ may help https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=GuclsqmdI02dC0ULxHR2T6

Never in the ten years that I have owned Garmin products, have I ever gotten a map download in anything less than eight hours.  I started this morning five hours ago, and it's only at 30.2% complete.  It's download rate is listed as 281.8 KB/s!

Then something is wrong with your system.  If the FAQ posted above doesn't help call Garmin for detailed help. Don't assume the FAQ won't help, work through each one of the listed topics.

On my dsl at work where it gets ~15 mbps download speed, GE typically transfers at ~11mps(about the same as the Xbox store). Typical north America maps updates are usually done in less than an hour.

I've just updated the full EU map on my laptop, the map is over 5Gb and completed in less than 15 minutes 

Mind you it did stall at 50%, wasn't sure why at first until I realised the laptop battery was showing low, connecting to power resulted in Express starting again and completing the update.  I'd forgotten one of the actions in the FAQ is ensure your laptop is connected to a power source!!

Which one? Asking as I'm not sure if I should power up my PC and check ;-)

If you mean which FAQ  then this one https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=iHMyFgM35Y3nqGPhyMFie5

It's linked to in the one I posted above.

I obviously wondered which EU maps you just updated - has there been new City Navigator maps released as I think they're due sometime around now?

Ah sorry, misunderstood. No, not a new update, just hadn't updated my laptop as I usually work from my desktop.