September 18, 2001

VoiceAge Provides Voice Compression
Technology to Vovida.org

G.729 (A) codec available to the global VoIP development community

Montreal, Canada, Tuesday September 18, 2001 - The open source movement got another boost today as VoiceAge announced that a freely available developers' version of their G.729 (A) codec software is available at Vovida.org, the open source communications web site sponsored by Cisco Systems, Inc. By providing their G.729 (A) high quality, low complexity, voice compression software implementation to Vovida.org, VoiceAge Corporation of Montreal is contributing to the efforts of the open source developers' community focused on developing Voice over IP (VoIP) applications where quality, delay and bandwidth are important. Developers wishing to make commercial use with this implementation are governed by recognized IPR procedures.

G.729(A) is quickly becoming an accepted standard for voice compression. Being only an 8 kbps codec, it offers opportunities for significant increases in bandwidth utilization to existing telephony and wireless applications and codec offers functionality such as toll quality, low complexity (MIPS, RAM, ROM) and low delay (10ms). VoiceAge's decision to offer a developers version of its G.729(A) codec will hasten adoption of the standard within the communications industry.

According to Laurent Amar, Vice President Strategic Planning and Business Alliances at VoiceAge, "Contributing part of our technological portfolio to Vovida.org became the only logical choice when considering our dissemination objectives for a targeted, globally centric VoIP development community. We're excited to contribute our advanced voice compression technology to facilitate development of new and innovative communications features, services and applications."

"The goal of Vovida.org is to promote the development and adoption of communications products, features and services on Internet Protocol (IP) centric networks. We feel that the 'G.729 (A) Initiative' will enable our development community to take advantage of a powerful, stable and widely deployed codec in their testing and development efforts. We see this contribution as a win-win situation for vendors, service providers and developers," said Alan Knitowski, Director of Marketing, Cisco Systems and Co-Founder of Vovida.org.

About Vovida.org

Vovida.org, a communications community site sponsored by Cisco Systems, Inc., is dedicated to providing a forum for open source software used in datacom and telecom environments; the only site to provide a Linux- and Solaris-based open sourced communications system (VOCAL), developmental protocols including MGCP, RTP, RTSP, SIP, COPS, RADIUS, OpenOSP and TRIP, and links to Open Source information sites.

 
 
About VoiceAge

VoiceAge Corporation develops narrowband and wideband low bit-rate audio and multimedia compression solutions for wireless 2G, 2.5G, 3G, and voice-over-packet networks. As experienced daily by hundreds of millions of users worldwide, VoiceAge's standard and proprietary solutions, built on the world-renowned ACELP® technology, ensure unsurpassed multimedia experience. VoiceAge was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Montreal, Canada. VoiceAge, SPOTxde and ACELP are trademarks of VoiceAge Corporation. For more information about VoiceAge, visit www.voiceage.com.