VoIP and Bandwidth Management

In the advent of Internet and dial up, VoIP was always deemed luxury. It was so hard to make voice calls back then, considering the latency and lag associated with slow speeds. VoIP was mainly used as a last resort back then; it was only used when other means of communication over the PSTN phone system are not working.

It’s a thing of the past now. Broadband speeds of today are more than enough for the measly traffic that VoIP always comes with. A sample for this would be this: some of the most high quality audio codecs used with VoIP in HD voice require around 128 kbs upload and download speeds. Majority of us today have over 2-3mbps connections. With speed connections reaching 10mbps, you’ll never have problems with bandwidth when using VoIP.

However, you can still have a bandwidth crunch when you use VoIP in a mobile. Today, 3G technologies give more than sufficient bandwidth to pave way for a seamless VoIP experience. It’s not the speed of the mobile Internet that serves as a limiting factor, but the latency and lag that come with wireless connectivity.

Wi-Fi connection serves to be a great alternative since it is covered by a standard Ethernet connection. It’s much more reliable within its area of operation. However, emerging 4G technologies are proving to be the perfect one for VoIP, which yields a new acronym – VoLTE – Voice over LTE.

Maybe the biggest threat to mobile VoIP is not the technology per se, but the data caps that are imposed by carriers. VoIP might not put a dent in your usage rates, it’s the wrong way of thinking that using it might cause overshooting in the data limits.