Bandwidth Requirements

Posted by AJ Jackson on 13 December 2012 11:03 AM

Question:

I think I might have some bandwidth related problems.
How do I know how much bandwidth I need?
How can I test how much bandwidth I already have?

Answer:

Bandwidth starvation will affect the sound quality of your phone calls. It can also cause calls to drop or disconnect in some instances.
The most common cause of this problem is that bandwidth is being used up by the computers at the location, or there are too many concurrent phone calls for the amount of bandwidth you have.
Please read below for more information on how to determine if you have enough bandwidth for your needs.
Please Note: If you do not have enough bandwidth, a LANgineers technician will be happy to review some alternatives that may be an option for your company.

General Notes

Your Broadband internet connection will generally have more download speed than upload speed. Remember that computers and other internet devices will lower your available bandwidth. If you are using near the full capacity of your connection, traffic will bottle neck and result in a delay in traffic arriving on time. This delay, known as latency, will directly affect call quality.

A good rule is to plan to use only 85% of your connections advertised ability.

Test Your Connection:

Below are a few links where you can test the bandwidth of your internet connection. The result will give you two numbers: upstream and downstream. Divide the lowest of the 2 numbers by 85. This is because each phone call uses 85 kilobits (kbps) of upload AND download bandwidth or speed. Therefore, this number is the number of simultaneous calls your connection can support IF there are no computers on the network also demanding bandwidth. Also note that if the results that you get on this test do not match up at least close to what you are being charged for by your ISP there may be a problem with the ISP’s setup or the connection going out to your location from them. You would need to give them a call and have them work on your connection to get it up to speed.

speedtest.net
pingtest.net
speedof.me (For those who do not have installed FLASH on their computer)

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