256k Enough Bandwidth for MJ?

offroad · Post by **offroad** » Mon Mar 29, 2010 5:49 pm

I'm considering Magic Jack to replace our land line.

We live in a remote area and can't get DSL or Cable internet, only Satellite or Wireless is available. Satellite won't work with my companies VPN so I'm using a Wireless Service. I'm paying for 256k but it routinely tests out closer to 512k and our pings average around 80.

Is that enough for good quality on MJ? I also use a Linksys WRT54GL wireless router with Tomato firmware. Looks like there is a sticky to help me get it working with MJ.

Any advice appreciated.

Darkman90808 · Post by **Darkman90808** » Mon Mar 29, 2010 6:44 pm

I'm sure some of the more savvy members of the group could answer your question directly, but there are some web sites that let you test your VoIP connection and quality. A quick Google search will bring up a number of hits.

http://www.voiptest.org/voip_for_home.html

http://myspeed.visualware.com/

http://www.spottelecom.com/keyword,Test+VOIP/search.htm

These may get you started. Good luck!

sabresfan · Post by **sabresfan** » Mon Mar 29, 2010 7:50 pm

That should be enough to run MJ without a problem. If your on a phone call you may want to limit your internet activities so your connection does not get overloaded as the call quality of MJ can suffer. I ran MJ with 128kbps upload for a little over a year and it worked well for me. You can also look into QoS to help manage your internet connection.

Kenny2469 · Post by **Kenny2469** » Thu Apr 01, 2010 3:00 am

I have a family member that is in the same situation, very very rural area, but they are successfully using the MJ with a 3G wireless internet stick on their laptop, and I mentioned in a post earlier that I demonstrated MJ successfully to a friend on my laptop using internet tethered from my iPhone with quality just the same as my cable internet at home...

hsweiss · Post by **hsweiss** » Thu Apr 01, 2010 3:58 pm

Darkman90808 wrote:I'm sure some of the more savvy members of the group could answer your question directly, but there are some web sites that let you test your VoIP connection and quality. A quick Google search will bring up a number of hits.

http://www.voiptest.org/voip_for_home.html

http://myspeed.visualware.com/

http://www.spottelecom.com/keyword,Test+VOIP/search.htm

These may get you started. Good luck!

256K should be more than adequate (as long as you also aren't downloading a movie at the same time)... However, as Darkman90808 states, you should run the VOIP test to see how you do in the jitter test. You might have enough bandwidth but if you ISP does not have a good packet interarrival rate (i.e., jitter), then you will be less than happy with MJ. Also, a quick and free way to test the link would be to install Skype and try it out with someone over the internet. Skype is not exactly the same as MJ (e.g., it does not use the SIP protocol) and therefore it can sound better over relatively poor connections. But at least its a quick (free) 1st order test.