Broadcom offers open source wideband codec

Citing HD voice as the reason, silicon manufacturer Broadcom is now offering its BroadVoice family of voice codecs royalty-free, without any licensing fee, AND as open source software under a GNU license.

Broadcom is releasing its wideband and narrowband BroadVoice codecs in both floating-point and fixed-point C code under GNU LGPL version 2.1.   The company says by eliminating royalties and licensing fees,  Broadcom is driving a cost effective transition to HD VoIP. Providing source code under an open source license allows the industry (i.e. people who make phones and boxes) with “maximum flexibility” in how it can be deployed.

The BroadVoice family of codecs include a 32 kb/s version called BroadVoice32 for wideband/HD speech sampled at 16kHz and a 16 kb/s version called BroadVoice16 (what else?) for narrowband speech sampled at 8 kHz.

Perhaps most interesting for readers of this website is the canned quote attributed to Broadsoft Senior Vice President & GM Dan Marotta (bold enhancements ours)–

“We are seeing an increase in the number of requests for HD voice support from service providers who want to differentiate their telephony services from their competition. By offering high performance and highly efficient BroadVoice voice codecs royalty-free, we are enabling manufacturers and service providers to transition to HD VoIP as a means to significantly improve their customers’ audio experience.”

Perhaps the more interesting question is who are those service providers who want to transition to HD?  Certainly, there are gobs of manufacturers large and small providing G.722 wideband support for enterprise and consumer devices and Europe is already on the HD voice bandwagon, with North American cable companies putting along their own path.