16000+, page-65

You may well be right accaeric. I tried again today with just 3G and installed a bandwidth monitor as well rather than just relying on the telstra 2G service and had much better results.

3G without bandwidth limiting

Making an audio only call, 3G to 3G the phone reported an average of around 13 kbps / 12 kbps throughout. The call quality was good, with some latency and delay in the audio. The delay was longer than a regular cellular call, but it was was quite possible to hold a conversation.

I tried a video call using the same configuration. It connected fine, video quality was fine (for a mobile video calling scenario). The bandwidth throughout the call was on average around 140 kbps / 130 kbps. I would say the audio quality and lag was similar to that of the audio only call.

In neither instance did I try to rate limit the data, so during an audio call ZipT only seemed to use ~12kbps (even though more bandwidth was available if it needed) and video ~135 kpbs.


Wifi to Wifi with bandwidth limiting

Without rooting my phone, I cant easily rate limit the traffic - I have tried but was not able to to achieve something similar with a router and its wifi but I cant rate limit as low 2G speeds.

I did manage to throttle the traffic and measure it on a desktop however. Using bluestacks and netlimiter audio calls still work fine at 8 kbps but the latency is notably higher than when it was unrestricted. My observations (not sure the best way to measure) was that unrestricted there was an audio delay of between 500-1000 milliseconds, limited to 8kbps it was around double this. The Call quality itself remained generally OK. This was with only the PC version being limited and the android running on wifi without limitation.

I wasn't able to test the video calling with a rate-limited connection as ZipT didn't seem to work with the camera in bluestacks. I have another testing method which I will try if I get some time which I hope might be more effective at limiting and measuring the calls.

Basically my experience with audio quality was fine. Much better than my testing when the app was first released. Still however I couldn't establish a call over an 8 kbps limited connection without noticeable audio delay - the quality throughout though remained OK in these cases.

Video seemed fine but looking at the bandwith usage so far, I will be very interested to see how it operates in 2G or even edge type environments.