50M Spotify being shaped?

Zanny · 15-05-2012, 19:25

Last few days my spotify on both windows and my androids connected to home network have been suffering from buffering/cutting out issues. 2 or 3 tracks play fine then the cutting out starts.

Im not the only one having issues, majority seem like virginmedia customers.

http://community.spotify.com/t5/Desk...low/td-p/60849

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/.../false#M112146

Anyone having same issue?
Have spotify changed some IP's and forgot to notify VM of change so VM havent updated their whitelists?

fixerman · 16-05-2012, 08:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zanny

Last few days my spotify on both windows and my androids connected to home network have been suffering from buffering/cutting out issues. 2 or 3 tracks play fine then the cutting out starts.

Im not the only one having issues, majority seem like virginmedia customers.

http://community.spotify.com/t5/Desk...low/td-p/60849

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/.../false#M112146

Anyone having same issue?
Have spotify changed some IP's and forgot to notify VM of change so VM havent updated their whitelists?

Me too! I have Spotify premium on my iMac, iPad and Tivo box. All are affected by this breaking up audio problem rendering it useless.

We should get a refund. We are paying for a service and not getting it.!

Daveoc64 · 16-05-2012, 13:25

I'm a bit suprised Virgin Media hasn't fixed their traffic management policy:

"This policy does not impact any applications other than Peer to Peer, so things like watching iPlayer, online gaming, making calls via Skype, downloading music tracks from iTunes or streaming them from Spotify and sending an email or normal browsing are unaffected."

The services in bold ARE (often at least) peer to peer!

Have they ever stated that those services get a specific exemption, or that traffic shaping applies only to "file sharing"?

qasdfdsaq · 16-05-2012, 14:33

By peer to peer they mean peer to peer file sharing.

broadbandking · 17-05-2012, 07:53

Virgin only shape things like bittorrent, newsgroups and P2P software like limewire they don't shape spotify it might be a problem with spotify try streaming for say youtube and see if its the same issue.

craigj2k12 · 17-05-2012, 11:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by broadbandking

Virgin only shape things like bittorrent, newsgroups and P2P software like limewire they don't shape spotify it might be a problem with spotify try streaming for say youtube and see if its the same issue.

Not on purpose anyway

Zanny · 17-05-2012, 18:56

Its been shaped! (Or a routing issue)

If VM bother to acknowledge the now 4 pages of people discussing this on their community forum we might get somewhere.

People are showing traceroutes to spotify showing 33% packet loss.

On the spotify forum they have admitted its virgins fault.

AND best proof at all its virgins fault if you use a vpn it works fine!

People are even suggesting the ip numbers that need adfing to virgins whitelist for Gawd s sake.

Let us in your system we'll fix it ourselves :p

---------- Post added at 19:56 ---------- Previous post was at 19:30 ----------

Ok someone from staff replied on vm forum.

Short version

Virgin say its spotifys fault
Spotify say its virgins fault

Sigh.

craigj2k12 · 17-05-2012, 19:14

if your getting that much packet loss, and its fine with a VPN then its more than likely a routing issue

Zanny · 17-05-2012, 19:35

Maybe just weird as was fine all morning then 12ish onwards it turns to poo.

qasdfdsaq · 17-05-2012, 20:19

Shaping does not cause packet loss.

Shaping does not care about the IP address.

rmwebs · 17-05-2012, 21:57

Looks like its an issue across the entire VM network, but nowhere else.

Certainly a fault at VM's end...not Spotify's

Daveoc64 · 17-05-2012, 23:05

I hadn't noticed this until tonight, but it's taking ages to sync music and it's struggling to load album art.

Quote:

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

Shaping does not care about the IP address.

Presumably the system used can be told to whitelist (i.e. ignore) all traffic from/to a specific IP (or IP range).

The user (i.e. VM) of the shaping system might want to shape a specific type of P2P traffic, but not for a specific service (e.g. Spotify).

The packet loss does suggest it's not traffic shaping though.

qasdfdsaq · 18-05-2012, 01:07

Probably, but what if Spotify uses a CDN so will have hundreds of different IPs which change depending on where you're connecting from?

Better solution would be to whitelist Spotify traffic.

Daveoc64 · 18-05-2012, 02:56

Quote:

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

Probably, but what if Spotify uses a CDN so will have hundreds of different IPs which change depending on where you're connecting from?

Spotify is primarily peer to peer.

In general:

-When the desktop client starts, it notifies the service which songs it has stored in its local cache.
-The first few seconds of any "new" song are streamed from a Spotify server
-The rest of the song is streamed from nearby peers that have the song in cache
-If no peer has the song in cache, the entire song is streamed from the server

I'd imagine that toggling the High Bitrate option (320kbps) - available to Premium members, would decrease the number of peers available to stream from. Given VM's Spotify offer, I'd guess VM has quite a few customers using the Premium service, with a greater likelihood that they'll experience streaming problems (direct from a server).

This use of peer to peer (hybrid) architecture is why I feel it's so stupid for Virgin Media to include it in their list of applications that aren't peer to peer. They should really change that list to make it clear they are referring to "File Sharing" - even better would be to list specific applications that ARE shaped.

qasdfdsaq · 18-05-2012, 04:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by Daveoc64

Spotify is primarily peer to peer.

Well in that case, whitelisting IPs is completely pointless.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Daveoc64

They should really change that list to make it clear they are referring to "File Sharing"

Virgin media do specifically say file sharing:

http://help.virginmedia.com/system/s...MER_TYPE=Cable

"At peak times we also slow down the speed of file sharing traffic – that's services like Limewire, Gnutella, BitTorrent and Newsgroup (Usenet) traffic."

Their full traffic management details page also specifically calls it "File sharing traffic management":

http://help.virginmedia.com/system/s...MER_TYPE=Cable

Quote:

Originally Posted by Daveoc64

even better would be to list specific applications that ARE shaped.

All unknown traffic is shaped so there's no possible way to list them.