How Much Bandwidth Do I Need for VOIP? (Revised 2020)

With the massive move to home-based office and work from home situations, we have been selling a lot of home office VOIP packages to companies and small businesses. When I did this article back in early 2018 the question would come up from time to time but now it is one of the most asked questions from callers asking about options. Although the amount of bandwidth needed for a VOIP phone call has not changed you now have to consider the other technologies you are using such as videoconferencing software such as ZOOM or GoToMeeting.

Internet Bandwidth Defined

Since I have lived in the Internet world for 20 years I guess I never thought about the word bandwidth and the fact that not everyone knows what the word means. Let’s get some clarity on what terms mean so the rest of this post will make more sense.

Internet Bandwidth is defined as the maximum data transfer rate of an Internet connection. So to put this in easier to understand terms I would use the example of your vehicle. If you put the gas peddle to the floor on the highway your car will accelerate until it peaks at a certain speed such as 120 miles per hour. So for your car, 120 miles per hour would be your Internet Bandwidth. You will often find this on your Internet bill as your package speeds.

Internet Bandwidth vs Internet Speed

Now that you know what Internet Bandwidth is you must also understand another common term in Internet Speed. Internet Speed is the ACTUAL amount of data passing through your internet connection at a given moment. We see this example most often displayed when people run speed tests online.

Your Internet Bandwidth might be 100M on your Suddenlink or Comcast bill but when you run the Internet Speed test you see you are only getting 78M. Internet Speed may fluctuate as more or less other users get online in the area around you.

Planning your VOIP move

When planning to make the move to Voice Over IP (VOIP) it is important to consider your Internet provider connection as it is the lifeline of your phone calls.  Many businesses we talk with are not even sure of their Internet speeds so we wanted to give you simple information you can use without having to become a technology geek.

When talking VOIP you need to consider several things:

1. What is your Internet download/upload speeds?

2. What type of Internet connection do you have?

3. Is your Internet able to handle your normal business and VOIP combined?

What is your Internet download/upload speeds?

I have 3 easy ways to confirm this information (and I say confirm because a guess is not good enough) without getting geeky:

1. Look at your provider’s bill.  Most cable or phone bills will either list what package or what speeds you have.  Typically it will be something like Premier Package 100M/5M

2. Although it may not be perfect you can run a speed test online such as www.speedtest.net or speedtest.xfinity.com

3. Submit a FREE technology expert consulting request from MotionVOIP and we will look over all your communication bills and give you an easy report (in PDF format) that clearly outlines what you have.  Let us help by clicking here:  https://www.motionvoip.com/request/

How much Bandwidth does VOIP use?

The answer is simple but becomes complex in that it is not just bandwidth that is important to have solid VOIP service.  VOIP service uses a variety of codecs to compress and decompress voice data.  Thes codecs use around 100 kilobits per second (kbps) traveling TO your phone line and FROM your phone line per second for each call.  So if you have 2 employees making a phone call, at the same time, then your minimum requirement for bandwidth is 200 kbps up and 200 kbps down (considering you are doing nothing else on the Internet at that time).  Reality is you will most likely still be using it for web browsing, online meetings, email, streaming music and more.

So now you know what you have and how much VOIP takes, the next questions that come up are:

How much bandwidth does your company need?

If you ask most geeks they will tell you that you need to look at the bandwidth usage on your router throughout the day.  For medium or large companies that have an IT department, this may be easy enough to do but many businesses do not have those abilities.  Our experts live in the real world so we have come up with a little easier way to estimate your needs.  Your business will need enough bandwidth to support web surfing, email, online applications, and VOIP.  Here is an easy way to estimate it:

How much bandwidth does your company need?

Number of Employees (bottom) vs Bandwidth Needed (left)

What type of Internet connection do you have?

Although you may get many opinions on this question, I look at real-world examples from customers over the last 15+ years in business and what I see that works and what does not.  Here is our assessment of what works and what does not (although it will greatly depend on your provider’s network):

PROVIDER	CAN I USE VOIP?
DSL - Business	Yes
DSL - Residential	Depends on Provider
T1	Yes
Cable	Yes
Wireless	No
Fiber	Yes

The main difference in connections and providers relate to what VOIP experts call Jitter.  We often use the word Jitter in talking about call quality or problems related to calls having echo sounds.  Jitter is a measurement of variations in consecutive latency test results. Fluctuation is considered harmful when it is more than 20% of your average latency.  The ideal is to be as close to 0 as possible (we have cable at the office, and we usually get Latency of 15 and Jitter of 2, which gives us excellent VOIP quality).  We can help you test your Jitter on your existing VOIP connection or test before selecting a VOIP provider.  If you want you can also find several online such as https://www.megapath.com/speedtestplus/ping-jitter-test/

Is your Internet able to handle your regular business and VOIP combined?

Quality of your Internet connection, also known to geeks as Quality of Service (QoS).  For the average person, this is how good will my phone call sound.  When you have a bunch of computers plugged into a network, then you plug in Point of Sale devices, credit card chip readers such as Square, video camera monitoring and streaming music your system is either smart or dumb about how it handles all this traffic.  If you do not have a managed router with QoS setup, then your data just goes on a first-come-first-serve basis.  If you have a QoS setup, then the router prioritizes valuable traffic over less critical traffic.

I always explain QoS as kids lining up after recess in the schoolyard.  If you are not using QoS, then the whole school just makes one big line based on who gets to the spot first.  If you have QoS configured, then the player’s line-up in a predefined ordered such as classes with certain classes (in this case, we could say VOIP) getting to go in first.  I know its a bit of a simple example, but it illustrates how QoS works.

Does your VOIP calls sound funny?  Do they echo or fade in and out?  Do you have QoS setup, or can your router even do this?