The Amount of Data and Bandwidth for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)

Cisco, a worldwide leader in IT, defines VoIP in this way:

VoIP (voice over IP) allows you to have your phone line on an IP (Internet protocol) network. It lets you combine voice, data, and video into a single service. It’s primary attraction is to help reduce expenses since telephone calls travel over the data network rather than the phone company’s network.

There are several ways to make a call from your computer or to utilize VoIP on your cell phone, and many are free. You can review the different ways to make calls, along with free applications available, on the following link: https://www.thebalance.com/free-internet-phone-calls-1356646

VoIP does not use much bandwidth, it just needs top priority bandwidth. It does require low latency and it does require low jitter.

Let’s say a normal VoIP phone call lasts one hour. Using .100 Mbps of symmetrical bandwidth (which is just a little overkill), you could talk 16 hours in a day and only use 21 GB per month.

As far as bandwidth, a .256 Mbps by .256 Mbps connection far exceeds the requirements for normal VoIP.

FaceTime, Zoom and Skype utilize VoIP, and they can can add in video to the call. This increases bandwidth and data. For example, if you “video called” for 1 hour, you would use an estimated .2 GB of data. If you “video called” for 8 hours a day, you would need an estimated 48 GB of data per month.

Bandwidth would also need to increase to 1.5 Mbps Down and 1.5 Mbps Up.

Skype (source: Skype Support)
•    For voice calls: 0.1 Mbps download / 0.1 Mbps upload
•    For video calls: 0.5 Mbps download / 0.5 Mbps upload
•    For HD video calls: 1.5 Mbps download / 1.5 Mbps upload

An important note: these connection speed requirements include downloading and uploading at the same time.