AUDIO CODEE RESELECTION FOR INCREASED PORT DENSITY

An Internet telephony gateway and method for operating a gateway are disclosed. The gateway is designed with a port to support a predefined maximum number of audio data channels. The gateway contains sufficient processing throughput to operate a first, high quality audio codec on a subset of the channels. However, this throughput is sufficient to operate a second, lower quality audio codec on a greater number of the channels, preferably all of them. The first and second codecs are designed to produce compressed audio data streams that are interoperably decompressable.In operation, the gateway host processor assigns new calls to either the first or second codec, depending on the current traffic being handled by the gateway. If new calls would result in the gateway's processing throughput being exceeded, the host processor may reassign a channel from the first codec to the second codec in order to create processing headroom for the addition of a new channel. Because the codecs are interoperably decompressable, no renegotiation need occur with the far end of the communication channel when a codec is reassigned. This gateway offers the potential for high-quality communication over the maximum number of channels possible, with a natural degradation as the gateway reaches its full channel capacity, using modest processing resources.