Bandwidth Consumption

AREDN does not the Internet and doesn't pretend to offer Internet speeds. No one is watching Netflix over AREDN; that's not what its for. But it is useful to get some idea of the resouces different applications will consume.

AREDN

0.25 Kbps per node

AREDN itself consumes bandwidth in order to maintain the network. This is a fairly chatty protocol which, essentially, involves ever node in the network broadcasting some information about itself across the entire network every so often. It's not much data, but it does add up.

Because every node will see this housekeeping data from every other nodes, it's easy to work out how much link bandwidth it will consumed simply by measuring the data across a given link for a given time for a given network size. and then doing some simple math.

Chat

...

Cameras

...

VoIP

57 Kbps per call

Voice over IP calls, using Asterix or similar, are a popular use case for the mesh. They use relatively little bandwidth, but are more sensitive to latency issues. There are many calculators which can help you determine your exact bandwidth requirement (e.g. here) depending on codec selection and number of simultaneous calls you need to support.

Video Calls

500 Kbps per caller

Video calls consume about 10x as much bandwidth as voice only calls. As with VoIP they're sensitive to latency issues. Technologies like WebRTC allow calls to be made peer-to-peer which avoids the need for high bandwidth, centralized servers. Better resolution requires more bandwidth.