Spotify killing my router?

Question

The first time this happened I thought it was just a coincidence. I have Spotify on my laptop but haven't used it in years. Yesterday I opened Spotify and within a few seconds, I noticed that my browser was no longer working. Strangely Skype continued to work but other programs such as Remote Desktop didn't work either. Initially I thought it was a problem with my laptop, but when I checked my Android device, I noticed that it too was no longer able to connect to the internet through the Wifi. Only after restarting the Wifi router was I able to reconnect to the internet.

Tonight this happened again after opening Spotify, so I'm quite confident that Spotify is the source of the problem. A Google search resulted in only this link, which was useless http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/spotify_kills_my_wireless_router_every_time

What can I do next time this happens, and how can I prevent it? I have to telephone another person to restart the router every time this happens, which is far from ideal for both of us.

Answer 1

Spotify is a P2P network, implying that utilization of the service will require a portion of your upstream bandwidth. Some users report that traffic from Spotify saturates their entire upstream. That would certainly account for your "browser not working", because all TCP (regular) internet connections require a small amount of traffic "in the opposite direction".

There are applications out there free and commercial, that will allow you to throttle bandwidth usage of user applications. Use of such "net limiters" may violate the Spotify EULA, which would make them pigs, but that's not strictly relevant...