Oxford University bans Spotify

Comments

• I'm not a student at Oxford, but the OUCS' claim that Spotify soaks up P2P traffic is a non-sequiteur.
  
  Networks can be either QoSed to prioritise the Spotify traffic very low, as it's easy to detect and classify, or they can funnel the off-net P2P traffic through a bulk traffic pipe, or they can simply block the ports used for Spotify's P2P traffic entirely. Spotify does not require P2P functionality to work (it merely uses that to lessen the load on its own master servers when people request popular tracks) - if a track isn't available via the cloud, the Spotify client will download it directly from the Spotify servers.
  
  Either the OUCS netadmins are being lazy, they don't have sufficient infrastructure in their core network to mitigate the P2P effect or they haven't provisioned enough slack capacity. I would expect one of the foremost Universities in the world would at least have a campus-wide fibre setup - at worst, a GigE/10GigE Cat6 network.
  
  If they're still rocking 100mbps copper networks then they really need a kick up the arse, even my Uni was capable of providing 10mbps ports to every room in Halls through its Resnet - and I was way out in the sticks! Posted by christopherwoods, United Kingdom
• I found that only allowing outbound/related connections to 78.31.8.0/21 TCP port 4070 allowed Spotify but still blocked the P2P aspect of the traffic (which shows up as multiple connections on UDP ports. Might want to add Spotify's other /21 netblock for good measure: 193.182.8.0/21).
  
  I was then able to QoS the Spotify traffic down to lowest priority where it couldn't disrupt anything. Posted by James Wilson, United Kingdom