May 31, 2012

Spotify problem "fixed"? UPDATE: oh no it isn't...

I'd pretty much given up with my Spotify service from Virgin Media: the service promises so much but of late has been pretty much unusable with tracks playing for a few seconds and then stalling, and playing again then stalling. Throw in a less-than-reliable iOS mobile App and it's proven to be worse than useless. Turns out I'm not alone:
"Virgin Media has been investigating a problem some customers have had with streaming music from Spotify during busier times of the day. "We have identified a recent issue with congestion between the Virgin Media network and Spotify's data centre which can occur intermittently during peak times. "Following some routing configuration changes, this congestion should now be alleviated; however further analysis is being conducted and additional routing changes or capacity upgrades will be implemented as needed to avoid re-occurrence of this issue as the popularity of the service grows. We apologise for any inconvenience."
Hmmm. Somewhat not monitoring things properly? Why was there no mention of this problem until customers started complaining? I found the service unusable during evenings and weekends and thought it was the flaky App on my iPhone, but turns out it's just maxed out and nobody at VM did much about it.
UPDATE: Not fixed. I'm getting the usual Sunday morning stuttering on Spotify every minute or so.

5 comments:

Dogsbody said...

Probably because Spotify uses the same protocols as BitTorrent. Virgin Media have always said they give priority to non Peer to Peer protocols si I imagine they shot themselves in the foot with this one.

Hew Leith said...

Yeah, it made me laugh when a Virgin rep said there wasn't a problem as they couldn't replicate it on their test bed. What did they use as a test bed? A silentnight king size?

Anthony said...

I've had this problem for a couple of weeks now, and even during the day today (Friday). If it continues, I won't carry on with the subscription when the free trial runs out ...

Nialli said...

I'm undecided about whether I carry on with Spotify once I have to pay for it. On the plus side, I've been able to revisit music that I used to own on vinyl and cassette but have never purchased on CD or download, plus I've rediscovered my love of film soundtracks, especially those of Hans Zimmer.
On the down side, it's proven awfully unreliable especially over the VM-powered wifi at home, stuttering and spluttering and often just disappearing completely. Now that may be resolved, I'll see how much I use it in the months I've got left without having to pay a tenner a month. It's not proving to be essential at the moment, especially with the flakey service

binx said...

"Probably because Spotify uses the same protocols as BitTorrent" - does this mean it could also LoveFilm, I have had a subscription for the last 3/4months and I have not yet managed to watch a film without the constant stuttering.