Found out this evening that my Spotify stream was being throttled.

After a bit of research and testing it appears that some ISPs (I gather Plusnet as well as BT as Im on) class Spotify traffic as p2p since at the moment a unique p2p signature hasnt been assigned to Spotify traffic and so it cant be let through as non-p2p. This is a problem if you also use BitTorrents as if you are a encrypted p2p user your IP address appears to be flagged for throttling of all (including Spotify) encrypted p2p traffic between 6pm and 10pm. I downloaded a torrent about 3 days ago (one of a few times a year really) and this evening I was getting throttled to something like 50kbs on Spotify only traffic. Fortunately resetting my router leases me a new IP address and now back at 3Mbs+.

HTH

Just switch to a better ISP which doesn't do traffic shaping.

Fair point, but its not much of an issue for me given the few occasions I run a torrent and a router reboot can fix it.

I actually like BT for some reason. I get no downtime from my line and when I did have a few problems with signal to noise ratios causing "retunes" I managed to do something I have absolutely no understanding of that has fixed it.

Spotify started struggling for me today for the first time, everything else fine. Is there a list of ISPs not playing ball? Restarting now…

kelvin, this is an example of what plus net do
http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/products/archive/bbyw/speed.shtml#Option3speeds

not sure whether other ISPs are so clear….

kelvin, check out here for a list of "bad" ISPs
http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs#United_Kingdom

Im on Plusnet and not had any significant problem with Spotify streaming

Others are though:
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php?topic=75288.0

its only a problem if you have used your IP address to stream encrypted torrents.

I have been with Plusnet for over 5 years and am fortunately on an unlimited package so no throttling.

I know that Plusnet run a fair usage policy whoch seems sensible bearing in mind that Broadband is a contended service!