Great show and oddly enough the audio was good on your end this time!
I'm looking forward to the new online radio station!
For the live streaming bandwith, maybe you can do it on youtube. I recall a show I used to sometimes listen to would do live youtube casting with google hangouts as the way for the hosts/guests to speak. The quality was pretty good.
For bitrate, running 22 or 44khz audio, mono at 64 kbits or so should sound very good! AAC+ HE (high efficiency) can even do stereo at that bitrate and sound almost CD quality (Pandora music does 64kbit AAC+HE stereo or 128kbit MP3- both sound the same)
I think also it would help prevent stuttering, audio issues, and dropouts by running a buffer delay of a few seconds. Realtime audio/VOIP/ skype/etc suffers the problem of jitter. You can have a really fast connection, but if packets arrive in a different order, the sound gets choppy/inaudible (or in the case of skype- the quality just drops to almost inaudible words). I'm not sure how yall will host the audio though, so that may not be an option.