So I recently switched to an AT&T entry-level unlimited plan from a capped one because my family would burn through any pre-allocated limit and now my Spotify sounds like crap when streaming over wireless, my guess it is the "Low" 24kbps stream as 96kbps generally sounds ok. Tried switching the quality level in app settings made no difference. They did say they would throttle video streams in the mobile plan description but nothing about Spotify or audio. Needless to say I'm pissed.
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Do mobile providers throttle Spotify streams?
- Thread starter gvl
- Start date
I seriously doubt that Spotify has 24 kbps stream lol. If you have throttling issues with your subscription plan, why not just offline 10000 songs to your cell phone and enjoy 320 kbps of high quality playback. Be aware that if you use live playlist, Spotify will still use data to redownload the new songs added on that live playlist
- Thread Starter
- #3
Thanks for showing me the manual. Looks like offline mode is your best bet if you can't get 96 kbps all the time or since you're in the US, switch providers to T-mobile or Verizon and maybe they have better ways of handling data throttling
- Thread Starter
- #5
Offline mode requires being proactive. I'm not. Sometimes I just want to play something random while sitting in LA traffic. I'm just trying to confirm it is not all in my head, but sound quality seems off. I'll probably just subscribe to a VPN service which should take care of this nonsense.
That’s a bummer. I’m pretty sure you can definitely hear a large difference between 24 kbps and 96 kbps even with stock earbuds. Not sure how VPN can help but at least that hides your music or video streaming flags from AT&T which can resolve the deliberate throttling
- Thread Starter
- #7
VPN encrypts and tunnels the traffic, so that ATT can't peek into the request headers and modify them so that Spotify servers return lower bitrate streams. The app caches the content on the phone and I'm not entirely sure if I try to play the same song 2nd time it will not just read it from the cache. I can clean the cache of course just need to find some time to do it right.
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- Thread Starter
- #8
Well, I checked mobile data usage at home and it seems to be more or less consistent with the set quality level, so maybe there is no throttling after all. Another possibility is that they throttle dynamically based on the level of network congestion and where I live there isn't much congestion at all unlike when driving at 5mph with 2 lanes full of cars on either side in an urban area.
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