Yes; backhaul connections in telephony applications are often very stable and are already capacity managed by tuning codec bandwidth. Say you are carrying 1000

Yes; backhaul connections in telephony applications are often very stable and are already capacity managed by tuning codec bandwidth. Say you are carrying 1000 calls with uLaw (64kbps * 1000) over a pair of links and one fails. Do you A) carry 500 calls on the remaining link B) stuff all calls onto the same link and drop 50% of the packets or C) Change to a 32kbps codec? It seems you may be imaging the failure case where your "ISP is slow" or something like that due to congestion or packet loss -- as I posted elsewhere in the thread the bandwidth is only one aspect of how a "low bitrate" codec may be expected to perform in a real world application. How such a codec degrades when faced with bit errors or even further reduced channel capacity is often more important in the real application. These issues are normally solved with things like FEC which can be incorporated as part of the codec design itself or incorporated as part of the modem/encoding/modulation of the underlying transport.