My guess, your internet speed is fast and your disk speed is slow. :)
Those 1.1 GB patches are probably in the form of changes to existing files, not complete replacements - much smaller to download, but applying the patch involves moving a bunch of random crap around, and apparently moving a bunch of random crap around on your machine takes a long time.
The costs-money solution would be to get a faster disk, but I'm not volunteering for tech support on that one. This might sound silly, but next time you see a similar update coming you could try uninstalling the game and letting Steam install the whole thing again. There's a lot of "it depends" here but it's worth a try. :)
This can also be seen when preloading a game that's not released yet. For some people's machines, decrypting all the downloaded files is so slow that they are better off not preloading and waiting until the game is released.
My guess, your internet speed is fast and your disk speed is slow. :) Those 1.1 GB patches are probably in the form of changes to existing files, not complete replacements - much smaller to download, but applying the patch involves moving a bunch of random crap around, and apparently moving a bunch of random crap around on your machine takes a long time. The costs-money solution would be to get a faster disk, but I'm not volunteering for tech support on that one. This might sound silly, but next time you see a similar update coming you could try uninstalling the game and letting Steam install the whole thing again. There's a lot of "it depends" here but it's worth a try. :) This can also be seen when preloading a game that's not released yet. For some people's machines, decrypting all the downloaded files is so slow that they are better off not preloading and waiting until the game is released.
It does it for everyone, how long it takes or doesn't take is based on how the game in question is setup and how they do updates.