Abstract. With the rising popularity of the real-time audio streamingapplications, it is important, in order to support (and to charge) properly thesenew services, to understand and characterize the behaviour of these newapplications. This paper studies the traffic associated with a specific audiostreaming on-live service, the radio over the Internet, and presents someanalyses and comparisons of different streaming media products. In addition,the user’s viewpoint is also taken into account, since it is ultimately the users(and their degree of satisfaction) who will decide whether a service goes to beor not successful. Finally, the study estimates the real bandwidth used by theon-line radio and examines how a cable network based on DOCSIS, have to beplanned in order to be able to support this new service.