[wellylug] VOIP calling band-width usage

[Richard Wade]

On Fri, August 17, 2007 15:18, Colin & Josephine Lewis wrote:
> I know this is slightly off-topic, but I am thinking of getting Skype
> but was wondering what sort of band-with impacts this might have on my
> broadband plan usage.  Does anybody have any ideas on typical usage
> requirements, and especially the differences between simple voice based
> approaches and going to a full voice and video scenario using a webcam?

Some quick and rough calculations suggest that you could do about 24 hours
of talking for 1GB of your broadband usage limit. I've put the numbers
I've used below in case you're interested. Roughly speaking, you can
divide this by about 3 if you're doing video as well -- so about 8 hours
of video-enabled chat for 1GB of usage. These are finger-in-the-air
numbers based on some real measurements I've taken at home and are just to
give a feel for the amount of talking/video'ing you could do. I'm sure
someone with more time and attention to detail will be along in a minute
;-)

The numbers I'm using are roughly 50kb/s for the VoIP, considering that
Skype uses G.729 and that it's a nice round number. For video, I think I
measured by gateway doing about 120-150kb/s (from vague memory), so
roughly three times the VoIP-only bandwidth. I'm considering that the
bandwidth usage is counted in both the upstream and downstream directions.
--
rik