How much bandwidth does it require and/or use?
Speed wise, I would generally recommended that a minimum of a 512/128 kbps connection is used for a single VoIP line. Any lower and the quality can drop, particularly if downloading or surfing the web at the same time. For more than one line, a good rule of thumb that I’ve found is to allow around 128kbs upload per line. 128k works fine (using the light G.729 codec) for one line but when two lines try to use it I find they both start getting crackly with lots of dropouts*. In terms of how much data is consumed per call there are quite a few variables that make it difficult to gauge accurately. Different codecs have different consumption rates, the length of calls vary and times where you’re not actually speaking means that there’s no data to transfer. For a very rough idea, one of the most popular codecs, G.729, has a consumption rate of just 8kbps which would roughly make a one minute phone call around 200 Kbytes once all the background traffic and so on is factored in, which means yo
