Bandwidth: Does your network have enough bandwidth to successfully send and receive voice and video packets? If not, the result is poor quality and dropped calls. The bandwidth that is consumed is determined by the codec that is being used by the IP phones and the VoIP phone system. It is also determined by the number of simultaneous calls that are traversing that network segment at any given time. The codec refers to the mechanism that samples the voice and converts it to IP packets.
The G.711 codec is most often used in Local Area Network (LAN) Deployments. This is because bandwidth is generally cheap and plentiful (a 100MB network switch is cheap). With G.711 and header compression, each call requires 82 Kbps.
The G.729 codec is most often used in Wide Area Network (WAN) deployment since bandwidth is not cheap and plentiful (a T1 is only 1.5MB and is expensive). With G.729 a voice call consumes about 26 Kbps of bandwidth.
The codec used can affect the quality. Because G.729 uses fewer packets to represent the characteristics of the voice call, the recreation of the call at the receiving end may not exactly match the original voice characteristics.
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