Requirements for streaming audio for 200-250+ listeners

[Northwave305]

We are an AM radio station in North Dakota that streams our audio 24/7. Right now, we are paying Live365.com for this service, but I was thinking of doing it ourselves to save money. However, I'm thinking that the cost of bandwidth may be more than we are paying Live365.

During the day, we have very few if any listeners. Usually none. When we broadcast local sporting events, we can have upwards of 250 listeners at one time on the internet alone. We currently have wireless internet, and I'm wondering if I built a server dedicated to streaming the audio, and gave it a dedicated internet connection from our ISP, would that be enough bandwidth to serve 250+ listeners at 32Kbps?

I checked the upload rate on my machine which is connected to the internet through a LAN behind a firewall and it is at about 272Kbps. I'm guessing my upload speed on a server with a dedicated internet line would be slightly higher? And would that be enough to serve that many people?

Also, our wireless radio that we got from our ISP a few years ago only operates at 10Mbps, so I will probably be upgrading that to 100Mbps if it would be possible for us to stream the audio ourselves.

kyle@kdix.net

[PeOfEo]

you will need more upload speed then that. Get on a t1. 300k upload which is what I have will only support max 40 users. With winamp shoutcast you also need 14k in ram per listener too. What we are going for wfrp 107.9 fm, the amateur radio staion I work with is using several mirror servers to spread the load.

[Sux0rZh@jc0rz]

needed for 275 users(25 extra.. you always wanna overshoot when doing these calculations to leave room..)

3500-3850 RAM (250-275 users at a time)
8000-8800 Kbps Upload(250-275 users at a time)

[Sux0rZh@jc0rz]

obviously your gonna need to spread it out over more than one server...

[Northwave305]

Thanks. After doing more research, it looks as though we may be better off paying Live365.com 150 bucks a month and not have to worry about maintenance, bandwidth, etc. We have a National playoff game on Saturday, so I am going to watch our stats, since that will be a good indication of what our max number of listeners will be. The 200 - 250 listeners sounded a bit high, so I will see for myself, it may not even be that high.