Friday, April 14, 2017

VoIP bandwidth consumption of various codecs

VoIP Bandwidth consumption naturally depends on the codec used.
When calculating bandwidth, one can't assume that every channel is used all the time. Normal conversation includes a lot of silence, which often means no packets are sent at all. So even if one voice call sets up two 64 Kbit RTP streams over UDP over IP over Ethernet (which adds overhead), the full bandwidth is not used at all times.

A codec that sends a 64kb stream results in a much larger IP network stream. The main cause of the extra bandwidth usage is IP and UDP headers. VoIP sends small packets and so, many times, the headers are actually much larger than the data part of the packet.

The bandwidth used depends also on the datalink (layer2) protocols. Several things influence the bandwidth used, payload size, ATM cell headers, VPN headers, use of header compression etc.

Teracall has the table which shows how the codec's theoretical bandwidth usage expands with UDP/IP headers:

Codec BR NEB
G.711 64 Kbps 87.2 Kbps
G.729 8 Kbps 31.2 Kbps
G.723.1 6.4 Kbps 21.9 Kbps
G.723.1 5.3 Kbps 20.8 Kbps
G.726 32 Kbps 55.2 Kbps
G.726 24 Kbps 47.2 Kbps
G.728 16 Kbps 31.5 Kbps
iLBC 15 Kbps 27.7 Kbps

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