VoiceAge Announces the Launch of the AMR-WB/G.722.2 Speech Compression Standards Patent Pool

MONTREAL, Feb. 1 /PRNewswire/ -- VoiceAge Corporation is pleased to announce the launch of a joint licensing program for the AMR-WB/G.722.2 Speech Compression Standard. The group of telecom leaders composed of Ericsson, France Telecom/Orange, Nokia and VoiceAge have joined their efforts to provide users with simplified access to the technology through the newly formed patent pool.

The patent pool will provide end product developers with convenient, fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory access to a portfolio of essential worldwide patents under a single license agreement. Other patent owners wishing to join the pool are invited to submit their patents to the same essentiality evaluation process that the founding members were submitted to.

Through this patent pool, license agreements can be obtained for the following: VoIP infrastructure and devices, wireless and non-wireless telecommunications and multimedia infrastructure products (such as base stations, base station controllers, radio network controllers, switching centers, gateways and servers), professional content applications (off-line content transcoders and professional content creation tools) and downloaded content applications (such as consumer content creation tools and media players) .

AMR-WB is the mandatory codec in GSM and WCDMA networks for conversational and multimedia services when these services evolve to wideband speech (7 kHz audio bandwidth). In addition, the deployment of G722.2 in the wire line network will result in better quality services by removing the need for transcoding between the two networks. In 2009, mobile phone carrier Orange introduced High Definition (HD) Voice, which makes use of the AMR-WB speech codec, in its mobile network in Moldova and is planning to rollout the service in Belgium and the UK in 2010 and the rest of the network shortly after.

"The time has come for both wireless and wire line networks to evolve to better quality voice applications and services. There is an increasing demand for deployment of the AMR-WB/G.722.2 standard in these networks. Therefore, it became imperative to establish a licensing program to simplify access to the technology. Another key objective was to provide a market enabling royalty structure to allow penetration of the technology in all markets," says VoiceAge President Laurent Amar.

For more information on licensing terms and conditions, please contact VoiceAge at [email protected].

About AMR-WB/G722.2

The Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband (AMR-WB) is the first wideband codec (~50 to 7000 Hz) to be standardized for both wireless (3GPP) and wireline (ITU-T Recommendation G.722.2) applications. It is the ideal codec for wideband speech applications across converging wireline/wireless networks as is reflected by the status of AMR-WB as the mandatory wideband codec in 3GPP wireless and TISPAN NGN system specifications. It utilizes the ACELP® (Algebraic Code Excited Linear Prediction) technology and this codec consists of nine bit rates from 6.6 to 23.85 kbps and includes VAD/DTX/CNG features for increased efficiency.

About VoiceAge

VoiceAge Corporation is a forerunner in the development and dissemination of speech and audio compression technologies and solutions for the Internet (VoIP), wireless (cellular 2G, 2.5G, 3G and Wi-Fi and WiMAX), fixed/mobile converged networks and consumer electronic devices. Our active participation in numerous international telecommunication standards organizations (3GPP, 3GPP2, ITU-T and MPEG) and our extensive ongoing experience as developers of codec implementations for diverse platforms and environments have nurtured world-class expertise that we bring to each new project. Today VoiceAge® speech and audio codec solutions, using designs based on our flagship ACELP® technology platform, deliver unsurpassed quality experienced daily by hundreds of millions of users worldwide. VoiceAge is the licensing administrator for the AMR, AMR-WB and AMR-WB+ patent pools.

SOURCE VoiceAge Corporation