Students at Oxford University will have to put up with a Spotify free existence from now on, after its IT department decided to ban the online music service.
Spotify has been accused of eating up too much bandwidth at Britain's oldest university, which has led the OUCS (Oxford University Computer Services) department to issue a ban.
Naxos, schmaxos
Speaking to Cherwell, the online site for Oxford University student news, a number of students have spoke of their anger over the ban with words like "shocked" and "discrimination" being bandied around.
One student, who is decidedly up in arms over the denial of Spotify access, said to Cherwell: "I use it loads. It's the most comprehensive collection of classical music in one place. Much better than Naxos."
Wise spending
OUCS has responded to criticism, noting that: "Bandwidth that seems insignificant for one user will soon add up when scaled up to the many thousands of users connected to Oxford University's networks.
"It is one thing attempting to justify a network upgrade on the basis of a genuine academic requirement, such as the petabytes of data expected from CERN when their latest collider comes online.
"Taxpayers and research councils tend to like to see their money being spent more wisely."
What's more wise than offering up free music to the UK's most priveleged? Sheesh, what's the world coming too?
Via TechCrunch
Your comments (5) Click to add a new comment
watcherzero
January 18th 2010
5. Another tale is that they would put on internet usage caps of 700mb a week from time to time when they felt like cracking down. If you went over you would be banned for 72 hours.
There was a router which assigned IP addresses in each hall of residence block, using your computers MAC address to enforce the ban. Every week a email would be sent out to all students listing the banned IP addresses and which block they belonged too. Each block typically had a maximum of 28 students and in those days less than 1/3rd had computers. One block managed to set a record of 37 bans in one week. Turned out every time they got banned they would change their computer's MAC address, and since the college couldnt identify which exact room the students were in they got away with it.
Alert a moderator
watcherzero
January 18th 2010
4. I remember My university years a decade ago, when I first started there was a college intranet ftp server run by the computer society with everyone of course having 100mbit connections in their halls. Shall we say this server was used for stuff less than Kosher... The server was shutdown by the university in my second year because it was responsible for 90% of the bandwith used on the whole University Intranet.
Alert a moderator
hornybeast
January 18th 2010
3. Bloody students
Alert a moderator
anteaus
January 18th 2010
2. By analogy, if I want to have a garden fountain why not just run it off mains water instead of buying an expensive pump? After all water costs nothing... does it?
Alert a moderator
caimbeul
January 18th 2010
1. Dont big universitoes have uber high end networks?
Alert a moderator
Tell us what you think
You need to Log in or register to post comments