February 1st, 2010

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

 

Montreal, Canada – February 1st, 2010. 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
licensing_VA@voiceage.com