What upload capactity is required for Skype etc.?

flop

HI all,

I was wondering what's the minimum upload bandwith required for using progams such as skype etc? A friend of mine has been experimenting with 256 kb/s with mixed results. I have a 512 kb/s upload connection and O haven't encountered any problems so far.

Is this matter directly related to the upload bandwith or is it a function of contention/latency etc.?

Regards
Flop

daveyjoe

Skype can degrade the sound quality for slower connections. 256kb/s is more than enough. In fact Skype will function quite well on the upload of a dial-up connection (although the latency may be a problem).

Bandwidth is not your friends problem, perhaps it has something to do with latency. What broadband service is your friend using?

flop

She's based in Drogheda and is using BT 2mb d/l 256kb/s upload. She did a speed test recently and had figures like 1.7mb and 201 kb/s respectively.

Cheers
Flop

HelterSkelter

256 is more than enough, it worked fine with 128k upload for me.

PixelTrawler

It works fine but it will eat as much bandwidth as it can get its hands on.

Girlfriend was using SkypeOut last night and the speed test dropped from 2.8Meg down to 1.2 Meg...., and downloads slowed a lot

Mind you online games were still playable at the same time....

irishpal25

when i was on dial up and didnt do anything else it workes perfect so assume it doesnt need much at all

watty

It can work on 33k diaup.
text chat even in a big conference eats nearly nothing.
128K gives very good audio and allows video too.

I'd estimate that video needs at least 100k for decent performance, though it may work on dialup (I have used WME v9 to stream video + audio at 28k).

The video option needs XP.

bad latency (slow pings) and packet loss affect it more than actual speed.

The Bull

I was talking to a mate of mine and he only has a 28K line. Does distort from time to time but on the whole could have a conservation on it

crawler

Skype uses an adaptive codec that they developed themselves - it will degrage the speech quality to match the quality of the line down to about 4Kbps iLEC type stuff which is sub GSM.

voice quality is based on the MOS score (Mean opinion score)- 5 is excellent and 1 is pooh. Typically skype users on 512/128 connection should experience a score of about 3.

More here ( http://www.testyourvoip.com/faq.html ) on all this stuff but Skype is kinda in it's own domain...

Xterminator

Skype will work perfectly on 64k. Remeber full hi-fidelity video conferencing is available on 3 x isdn lines (384k)

Anything less and sound quality may be comprised.

Hence any stable broadband connection should be more than sufficient.

X