When I teach SIP, H.248, Cisco, or Avaya training courses, I’m often asked how to calculate necessary bandwidth for a VoIP network. I’m actually headed out the door to teach a SIP Essentials class this week, and seeing as I am anticipating this question, I thought I might post some helpful resources on the subject.

Essentially, it’s a question of the type of payload (codec you’ve selected), the sample period (how many samples per packet), and then taking into consideration the IP/UDP/RTP header information (generally, 40 octets), and then transmission overhead (generally, Ethernet 18 octets). After calculating bandwidth required for one call, […]