Voip data usage over UMTS

[abu_sme]

I am moving to the Netherlands in september. I have reasearch the cellphone plans they have over there and they are pretty awesome. I can get a 200 MB data plan for 10 euros. My phone (nokia n80ie) has a built in VOIP client that can use either wi-fi hotspots or it can go over UMTS/EDGE. I have never tried to use it over a network signal, but I am considering it over there so that my family doesn't have to pay huge long distance bills to call my cellphone (25 cents a minute!)

Would a 200 MB data plan suffice for going exclusively VOIP and making about 4-5 hours of calls a month? Service coverage will not be an issue as the country has 100% coverage even underground.

[Gee]

If you are using standard SIP, then the bandwidth required will be 64k per second. Unless you have access to higher compression (depends on your provider) it will be 8k per second.

Lets go with the worse case scenario. At 64k per second, your minute usage would be 3,840k and an hour would be 230,400k

So you are well under the 200 Meg. The calculations are simplified, but you get the idea

[Kwirky]

If you are using standard SIP, then the bandwidth required will be 64k per second. Unless you have access to higher compression (depends on your provider) it will be 8k per second.

Lets go with the worse case scenario. At 64k per second, your minute usage would be 3,840k and an hour would be 230,400k

So you are well under the 200 Meg. The calculations are simplified, but you get the idea

Just wanted to clarify this post... G.711 uses 64Kbit/s = 8KByte/s

So, you'd be using 8KBytes per second, 480KBytes per minute, or 28,800KBytes (28.125MBytes) per hour. Add in TCP/IP overhead, etc. and you'd be safe with 5 hours/month, but I wouldn't want to go too far over that. As mentioned, if you use a higher compression codec like G.729 or GSM, the talk time will go up but the quality will go down somewhat. Since you'd already be using a cellphone, GSM may be your best bet, and at 13Kbit/s, you'd be down to a mere 5,850KBytes (5.71MB) per hour.

[abu_sme]

Thanks, I'll have to do a babelfish translation to make sure that I am not violating Orange's AUP.