Made for your next broadcast
How much will your listeners use?
Radio bandwidth, calculated.
Set a bitrate and an audience and see the gigabytes per day and month, the uplink your server needs at peak, and which listening-hour pool it fits.
- Free to use
- No signup required
- Works in your browser
Your station
Connected at a typical moment
Your busiest show
What it adds up to
Per listener-hour
55 MB
at 128 kbps
Per day
32 GB
600 listening hours
Per month
966 GB
18,000 listening hours
Uplink at peak
7.7 Mbps
60 listeners × 128 kbps
Listeners per 100 Mbps
781
one server, before overhead
Pool at 128 kbps
18,000 h
Fits the Starter plan
| Bitrate | Per listener-hour | Per month | Nobex plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| 32 kbps | 14 MB | 241 GB | Starter |
| 48 kbps | 21 MB | 362 GB | Starter |
| 64 kbps | 27 MB | 483 GB | Starter |
| 96 kbps | 41 MB | 724 GB | Starter |
| 128 kbps | 55 MB | 966 GB | Starter |
| 160 kbps | 69 MB | 1.2 TB | Pro |
| 192 kbps | 82 MB | 1.4 TB | Pro |
| 256 kbps | 110 MB | 1.9 TB | Pro |
| 320 kbps | 137 MB | 2.4 TB | Pro |
Nobex plans are quoted in listening hours at 128 kbps (Starter 20,000 · Pro 150,000 · Business 500,000); a 64 kbps stream uses half a pool-hour per real hour, 256 kbps uses two. No plan limits how many people listen at once. See the plans.
Your station, powered by Nobex
Or let someone else worry about the gigabytes.
No plan on Nobex limits how many people can listen at once. You get a monthly pool of listening hours on a global CDN; no server to size, no overage surprises.
- Go live from your browser, phone, or encoder
- Keep your station on air with Cloud AutoDJ
- Bring listeners to a player on your own website
Try test mode with no card. Paid plans for ongoing broadcasting.
The arithmetic
Where the gigabytes come from.
Streaming bandwidth is one multiplication: bits per second, times listeners, times seconds. Everything else is unit conversion.
| Bitrate | Per hour | 24 hours |
|---|---|---|
| 64 kbps | 28 MB | 675 MB |
| 96 kbps | 42 MB | 1.0 GB |
| 128 kbps | 56 MB | 1.35 GB |
| 192 kbps | 84 MB | 2.0 GB |
| 320 kbps | 141 MB | 3.4 GB |
- 01
Use average listeners for the bill, peak for the pipe.
Monthly transfer follows the average audience. The server’s uplink has to survive the busiest minute of your biggest show, so size that on peak.
- 02
Count the hours you actually stream.
A station that runs AutoDJ overnight is on air 24 hours; one that only goes live for a three-hour show, and is silent otherwise, uses an eighth of the bandwidth.
- 03
Halve the bitrate, halve everything.
Moving from 128 to 64 kbps AAC keeps most of the quality and cuts transfer, uplink and cost in half. It is the single biggest lever you have.
- 04
Leave 20% headroom.
HTTP overhead, listeners who reconnect, and the encoder feeding the server all add up. Do not run a port at its calculated ceiling.
A few useful answers
How much bandwidth does an internet radio station use?
Bitrate × listeners × time. One listener on a 128 kbps stream uses 128,000 bits per second, which is 16 KB per second, 57.6 MB per hour, or about 1.35 GB per day if they never stop. Twenty-five average listeners around the clock at 128 kbps is roughly 1 TB a month. The calculator does this for any combination.
What is a listening hour?
One listener connected for one hour. It is the unit streaming hosts, including Nobex, use to size plans, because it does not depend on whether you have 10 listeners for 10 hours or 100 listeners for one. At 128 kbps a listening hour is about 56 MB.
Which bitrate should I stream at?
128 kbps MP3 is the long-standing default for music: good on headphones and cheap on mobile data. AAC sounds the same at about 96 kbps and talk radio is fine at 64 kbps. Above 192 kbps you double or triple the bill and listeners on cellular buffer more, for a difference most cannot hear on a phone speaker.
How many listeners can one server handle?
Divide the server’s uplink by the bitrate. A 100 Mbps port carries about 780 listeners at 128 kbps before overhead, so plan for around 700. A 1 Gbps port, about 7,000. Icecast itself is not the bottleneck; the network port is. A CDN removes the ceiling by serving listeners from many edges.
Do plans on Nobex limit concurrent listeners?
No. No Nobex plan caps how many people can listen at once. Each plan includes a monthly pool of listening hours quoted at 128 kbps — Starter 20,000, Pro 150,000, Business 500,000 — and the calculator shows which pool your numbers fit. A 64 kbps stream uses half a pool-hour per real hour; 256 kbps uses two.
Is kbps kilobits or kilobytes?
Kilobits. Encoders and streaming servers label bitrates in kilobits per second; there are 8 bits in a byte, so 128 kbps is 16 kilobytes per second. Data transfer is billed in gigabytes, which is why the calculator divides by 8 and then by 1024 twice.
Keep reading
Costs, quality, and the hosting behind them.
Written by the team that runs the streaming platform, not by a content farm.
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