Codecs & asterisk

If you have worked with Asterisk/Trixbox for any length of time, you have dealt with codecs. You’ve seen terms thrown around such as ulaw, alaw, G711, G729, and on and on and one. But what are these? And what are the differences between them? When should use use G726 instead of ulaw? What codecs are even possible in Trixbox? I’ll try to clear some of this up.

For VoIP communication, you need to start with a protocol. The three big protocols are SIP, IAX2, and H323. SIP and IAX2 are natively supported in Trixbox’s version of Asterisk (v1.2), so I’m going to assume that you’re using one of these. Once you have your protocol in place, a codec tells the system what format to send the calls across the protocol.

Codecs are used to convert an analog voice signal to digital. They vary in sound quality and bandwidth consumption. Typically, the better the sound quality, the more bandwidth consumed…the less bandwidth consumed, the worse the sound quality. Here are the codecs currently supported in Asterisk v1.2:

ulaw - AKA G.711 - 64Kbps - ulaw is the standard US codec for uncompressed voice. For internal extension to extension calls, this is the preferred codec. Notice the 64Kbps? This is how much bandwidth is consumed by this codec. When thinking about bandwidth consumption, I like to think in terms of phone lines…a typical phone line (or T1 channel) is 56Kbps (remember the days of modems??). ulaw is just a little higher than that. If your Internet connection is a modem, you would want a more compressed codec. If you have 768Kbps up/down DSL, you should be able to run 12 ulaw calls across the connection (768Kbps / 64Kbps = 12). That is typically not recommended however, and with other Internet stuff going on, that number gets reduced significantly. If a client told me they had a 768Kbps connection, I would tell them not to expect good voice quality on more than 3-4 simultaneous calls with ulaw and that connection.

alaw - AKA G.711 - 64Kbps - alaw is the same as ulaw, but it is the European standard codec.

G.723.1 - 6.3Kbps or 5.3Kbps - This is the standard codec used by H323. Since I’m not talking about H323, I’ll skip this one.

G.726 - 32 Kbps - G726 is a good alternative to ulaw when you need to save some bandwidth. It consumes 1/2 the amount of bandwidth of ulaw, and the voice quality isn’t degraded much.

G.729 - 8Kbps - The G729 codec is excellent, but there is a trade-off. It has very low bandwidth consumption and decent voice quality, however it also has a dark side in that it isn’t free. G.729 licenses are available from Digium at the cost of $10.00 per channel. They also take a significant amount of CPU power to process the compression. Installation requires a purchased license from Digium, and you have to download and run their registration program…it is pretty easy to do, but is still an additional step. Plus, it bases the registration on the MAC address of the computer it was installed on, and is only transferrable once (and you have to contact Digium to do it). This is a good codec, but try G.726 or GSM first.

GSM - 13Kbps - GSM is a codec that comes from cell phone technology. It has pretty low bandwidth consumption, but you will notice lower voice quality than a standard PSTN line.

iLBC - 13.33Kbps - iLBC is another low-bandwidth codec. They claim better quality than G729, but I haven’t had much experience with them…I don’t know if that is a true statement or not.

Speex - configurable 4-48Kbps - Speex is another less-known codec. It’s advantage is that it is flexible (4Kbps to 48Kbps) in terms of bandwidth consumption, but it takes up more CPU than even G.729. Again, I have never used this codec, so I don’t know much more about it.

I hope that helps clear codecs up a bit. My general rule of thumb is to use ulaw if there aren’t any bandwidth constraints. If bandwidth is a consideration, I then try G.726 and GSM in that order. If a customer is jazzed about G.729, I have no problem using that as well (although I don’t think it offers enough advantage over G.726 or GSM to be worth $10 bucks).