Is Your Internet Connection Fast Enough for VoIP?
Are you thinking of ditching your old wireline telephone and going exclusively with a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone, sometimes called an Internet phone? Your Internet service provider needs to meet certain requirements. One is raw bandwidth--the carrying power of your uplink and downlink. Be careful here--often what is advertised is the downlink speed--sometimes the uplink speed is much slower.
An Internet phone will require about 90 Kbps (kilo bits per second) both up and down. If your broadband link is faster than this, you may be ok on the bandwidth front. But note--if your link isn't much faster, and another person in your household who is sharing the line with you starts a download, for example a song for an iPod, this can cause voice quality issues, including stuttering and occasionally completely dropping the call.
But there's more. In addition to measuring bandwidth, one also needs to know the latency. The latency is how long it
An Internet phone will require about 90 Kbps (kilo bits per second) both up and down. If your broadband link is faster than this, you may be ok on the bandwidth front. But note--if your link isn't much faster, and another person in your household who is sharing the line with you starts a download, for example a song for an iPod, this can cause voice quality issues, including stuttering and occasionally completely dropping the call.
But there's more. In addition to measuring bandwidth, one also needs to know the latency. The latency is how long it
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