Bandwidth Control

[ceg3]

I was talking with a tier 3 TWC support guy yesterday about an issue and the subject of my call quality came up. He said one of the problems with VOIP, other than TWC Phone, which uses the net, but is on a separate network, is that the services tend to try to use all your bandwidth.  That got me to thinking about bandwidth control for the first time in a long time for my OBi.  I remember two or three years ago setting it up with 100 kbps up and down for my OBi at that time, but I can't remember what the experience was like then.

Is anybody employing this these days with their OBi?  As you can see, I have plenty of bandwidth.  Bufferbloat at that moment brought down my score, but you can see I have lots bandwidth.  I'm trying to imagine an application, in this case VOIP, demanding all that bandwidth and then having issues if it can't get it all.  Am I onto something or just all wet?

[drgeoff]

VoIP does NOT try to use all your bandwidth. It runs at a fairly constant rate which depends on the voice codec in use. Most times that is a 64 kbit/s codec. I'm aware of lower rate codecs being used for IP telephony but not higher rate ones. There will be some added overheads on that 64 kbit/s which could take it up to around 100 kbit/s but not more.

It is the other services and applications such as web browsing, file downloading, P2P which attempt to use all the bandwidth they can get.

[ceg3]

OK, so if the other sources are attempting to use all the bandwidth, then that is where QOS comes into play I assume.  I have a TP-Link router and they use bandwidth control to create QOS.  The TWC rep had his viewpoint, perhaps a wrong one.  Is anyone setting up a consistent experience for their OBi by setting up a specific max and minimum bandwidth, ie 100 kbps.  It would take all the devices I've got to utilize so much bandwidth that my OBi would not have 64 kbit/s available, but it somehow makes some to sense to my thinking that inconsistency might create issues for VOIP.  By setting a min/max bandwidth for the OBi the experience would not be fluctuating and might help, since they don't require much bandwidth.   

[Studio_Musician]

It would take one video that's streaming to use up all the bandwidth you've got.

edit: If you want to look at some audio codes you could install x-lite.  Then go Softphone => Preferences => Audio Codecs then click and get educated a little.

Audio codecs are also covered at wikipedia.com:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_codecs

[ceg3]

Good point about the video.

[SteveInWA]

If that level of stoopidity is representative of TWC's Tier 3 support, I'd hate to think of how painful it would be to talk to their Tier 1 support.  There is no need for QOS settings in your case, unless you are running a content streaming server farm in your house.

[ceg3]

  Nice, Steve.  Solid, simple truth for a simple-minded user.  No truer words have been spoken about tier 1 at TWC.

[SteveInWA]

The only thing that that person said (at least, if I understood your interpretation of it), that had a grain of truth to it, was the comparison of VoIP supplied by TWC vs. VoIP supplied by a third party. 

The major cable companies who offer VoIP via a "triple play" bundle are generally also CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers), who control the entire path of the call, including the PSTN and VoIP portions of the call.  They typically run VoIP exclusively on their own managed IP networks, instead of the unpredictable public Internet, so they are able to use QOS and traffic shaping technology to provide dedicated, protected bandwidth for the calls.  So:  VoIP from Comcast, TWC, etc, is generally going to be more reliable and have fewer audio quality issues.  Another example of "you get what you pay for".

[ceg3]

Your understanding of how TWC handles the VOIP portion of their phone system is consistent with what the Tier 3 guy said.  I would like to use TWC, but like you said, you have to pay more for it than I do PhonePower over OBi.  I think you can get it for 10.00 (before taxes and fees) for the first year and then of course you will have to work at it to keep that rate.