In the current economic climate many companies are downgrading from expensive diginet lines, with their low bandwidth and high cost, to bonded ADSL which allows up to 20Mbps download speeds and up to 2Mbps upload speed.  But bonded ADSL can also be used to cut costs by providing cheap and abundant bandwidth for a VOIP trunk for your IP-PBX, such as Asterisk, and not just to save money on data usage!

One of the big restrictions with using VOIP in South Africa is bandwidth. A single VOIP call, encoded with G729 codec, can use about 32kpbs once all the overhead is taken into account. Due to ADSL's asymmetric nature, where your upload speed is a fraction of your download speed, it means that a 4mbps ADSL line, with 512kbps upload speed, can only support, at most, 9-16 simultaneous calls, provided the line is used for nothing else! This is normally not sufficient for medium sized companies and until now there was not much one could do to get cheap, abundant bandwidth.

Bonded ADSL can provide 64 VOIP channels - thats 2 X Telkom PRI ISDN lines

Although the cost  of broadband is set to fall and the bandwidth set to increase, but probably not as fast as we would like or expect, there are options available today that make the use of a VOIP line in businesses a viable option. One such option is bonded ADSL which has the added benefit of allowing users to benefit from the future developments with broadband speeds and price. If one were to use a bonded ADSL solution, with a 2mbps upload speed, one could get up to 64 simultaneous calls, enough to rival a Telkom PRI ISDN line!

Not only will you save money by using a cheaper technology than diginet, but you also avoid the expensive telkom PRI ISDN line costs and get the cheapest call rates available in South Africa!