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Will I get 'Dinged' for Excessive Bandwidth for a WX radio feed?

J

JohnnyElectron

Our cable system started a deal where they charge you for 'excessive bandwidth' usage. IF I was to put my own streaming 24/7 station online, would I likely exceed their BW cap? Would there be a big difference between using 16kps MP3 vs 24kps MP3 or 16kps WMA or AAC ? What is most efficient? All I want to do is provide WeatherUnderground with a high quality audio feed of the local NOAA Weather Radio station, but I know some Internet radios choke on 16k MP3, so that's why I'm thinking 24k MP3 or 16k with different encoding? Does the BW usage go up if I have 20 listners, vs 1, or is it a constant usuage if I'm always running audio 24/7? I'm a newbie at this, but want to provide the WX audio.
Thanks,
Johnn
 
Here's my 2 cents

1. The Best way: If you are using a streaming service and broadcasting out to it then say at 128K mp3 would be just under 40 Gigs per Month at 24/7 and the number of listeners would be dependent on that streaming service provider. You should be fine for 100 listeners, meaning 100 listening at the same time which would be rare.

2. The Cost prohibitive Way: Now the way you are considering by setting up your own service then people will be connecting directly to you and at 128k mp3 even at a decent up/down rate from your cable provider you would get slammed if one solid stream at 40Gigs a month times how many people come in to listen...and you'd probably have a hard time doing your own thing on the internet such as surf or send and receive email. Watching video will probably slow you down the a crawl.

Now the good news: If you only expect some family and friends to pop in now and then, it shouldn't be a problem.


Cheers
 
First of all, don't use WMA. It's an MP3/AAC world now, so use either of those codecs instead. MP3 (and to a lesser but increasing extent, AAC) is more widely used and far cheaper (and simpler) to implement than obsolete proprietary Micro$pend junk like WMA/ASF.

AAC is generally more efficient than MP3 especially at higher bitrates, although I don't know how much of an advantage it would have over MP3 at something as low as 16K (what sample rate do you plan on feeding at, 11025 Hz? 16000?) For such narrowband FM speech signals as NOAA stations put out, 11025 or 16000 in 16Kb/s MP3 format should be plenty sufficient for a streaming simulcast. 128K (as Vanlen suggested) would be way overkill.
 
We use DJC Media for all 8 of our Stations, and for what we get from them, the cost is more then reasonable. Very Good Tech Support Too. Check them out here http://djcmedia.com
 
OMG hold the phone here: If you stream music I suggest no lower than 32K and AAC+ all the way here. 24K would work at say 22Khz sample rate and does OK. If your gonna stream to an audience and have a super low budget you can get a FREE host like RadioLoyalty and make some money via the ads. My station is also on TuneIn.com and using RadioLoyalty and streaming at 128K all day long. RadioLoyalty does not support AAC+ (Yet) but I've teen talking to Hector about this issue.

Other not FREE options are to start out FREE (immediately upgrade) on http://myradiostream.com their cheap server when upgrading isn't too bad for those who are on a fixed income and you get 1,000 slots. I know premium servers are the best, but for those on a shoe string budget you gotta crawl before you can Run. You can always change servers if any buffering happens but this should not be the case.

Royalties are the thing that will kill you so the RadioLoyalty method is the way to go for beginners and branch out from there or for handicapped individuals on SSDI who have a mortgage to pay as first priority here.

Best of luck.
 
Johnny Electron says this: "All I want to do is provide Weather Underground with a high quality audio feed of the local NOAA Weather Radio station". That's narrowband (<=5 kHz) monophonic computer-generated speech, not music. 22050/24Kb/s mono MP3 is more than sufficient for this kind of stuff, and anything higher would probably just be a waste of bandwidth (read: money.) He could probably even get away with encoding a NOAA stream at 16000 Hz/24K mono and come out alright. Unless he plans to use it as an STL or something, 128K* for a NOAA stream is very excessive.

Last I heard, NOAA didn't require a royalty to relay their audio (since it's a work of the U.S. Federal Government, it's in the public domain to begin with.)



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* Personally, music should never be encoded at sample rates lower than 44100Hz, especially if it's stereophonic music made within the last +- 50-60 years.
 
If you do a search of NOAA stations on tunein, you will find a range of 16kbps to 128kbps. Although there is a noticeable difference between range, but 16kbps MP3 sounds fine to me.
 
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