Comments on: Oxford University Bans Spotify For P2P Use

By: Oxford Uni bans Spotify « Reality Bytes

Oxford Uni bans Spotify « Reality Bytes — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 03:29:30 +0000

[...] Torrent Freak Sky [...]

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 05:15:02 +0000

It’s not blocked at my university. Actually Spotify isn’t available in my country (anymore), but still possible to use it(2 weeks travel). They banned all fileshare programs at my uni and bittorrent(but only tracker communication). Rapidshare works but 60k students share 5 IP’s.

And we get only get 4 GB a month download, since more couldn’t be for educational purposes.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 11:42:13 +0000

Meh sucks. I’m a music undergrad at Oxford and after using mostly Naxos for my first couple of years discovered the wonders of spotify last year. It’s far better than Naxos for which my tuition fees go towards paying for a subscription.

Anyway doesn’t seem to matter, my college hasn’t blocked it yet even after migrating their servers at the start of this year. I fully intend to continue abusing it by proxy or vpn if they do get round to blocking it.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 02:08:26 +0000

“they’re parents”
“there parents”

I find it hard to believe you people really are university students. :D

By: TerribleTony

TerribleTony — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 09:07:10 +0000

Bloody toffs can afford to pay for their own music. :)

By: Goofey

Goofey — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 17:00:18 +0000

What many commenters don’t seen to realize is that the main bandwidth hog is not the Spotify client downloading music—it’s it uploading music to outside the uni network. This is not an issue with standard http streaming.

By: Tommy

Tommy — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 10:58:05 +0000

spotify might well do the oppesite, heck p2p can realy help a campus network

meybe oxford should setup a spotify cache server for students, much like steam does (has cache servers around the world)

By: some guy

some guy — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 00:51:12 +0000

I can fully understand them.

While Spotify does cache songs for further plays, the amount of data per song is fairly high (I estimate about 1.5-2MB per minute from what my phone is using, even more for “high bitrate”), and it does turn into an impromptu P2P client that transfers bits of downloaded songs to other users (to offload Spotify’s servers) with no way to turn it off.

This translates to a huge torrent of traffic, which could be detrimental to the network as a whole. Sure, they could just add another few lines and routers… Or they could do the free option and block Spotify.

If you really, really want to use it, assuming you have the option of mobility: pay for Premium, start up Spotify at an off-site location and sync your most important playlists. Then you should be able to listen regardless of bans. ;)

By: alex

alex — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:27:56 +0000

have u guys NEVER heard of a VPN or tunneling? tunnel spotify through the http port and your golden… jesus..

By: Bob

Bob — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:56:28 +0000

Facebook group for lifting the ban http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&ref=search&gid=180375099105