AAC+ has no ringing, is crystal clear, and adopted well by most hardware and software people now. May be other options, but not if you want to be heard on devices other than a geek's PC. God FORBID people can like mp3 streams. Most have ringing, and are awful! Even the big corporate broadcasters haven't figured that out yet, but...they never claimed to care about the sound of their stations, either.
Disagree on the bandwidth for crud. Program suppliers like WION pay for a certain level of bandwidth, in our case both AAC+, one stream at 48k, one at 128k, listener choice on most players. While the number IS "averaged"...it is also limited and "capped" in how much we can have per listener, and very close to what is stated. You can watch the screen on some 'net radios and the numbers will vary, but, the MAXIMUM is usually well within a (very) small tolerance. It wouldn't matter if I was piping down a thunderstorm on AM or my clear, wonderful AM stereo...the stream doesn't care. It'll be an output of 10khz (average) wide, on a 48k or 128k stream.