What companies and people rate merit as HD Voice “players?”
Who comes to mind when you say “HD Voice” or “Wideband” or “G.722?”
Nominate people and companies as leaders in the HD Voice space. HD Voice News is making some lists and checking them twice, so if you think someone has been especially nice — or naughty, can’t leave out the adult industry — email the editor at dmohney@hdvoicenews.com.
Deadline for submissions is December 14, with lists to be published shortly there after.
Tony Stankus
Gigaset
Tony Stankus
Gigaset
Well, Fraunhofer, the inventor of MP3, coinventor of AAC, and inventor of AAC-LD, the low latency, super-wide-band communications codec used in really high end video conferencing systems, where compromises in audio performance are unacceptable, clearly should be on the list.
In fact, I cringe when I see discussions about HD-VoIP introducing yet another barrier for a next generation audio communication system, namely replacing 3.5 kHz with 7 kHz (yes, it’s better, but why limit yourself to just above AM radio quality, and speech only???). The good thing about VoIP is that we can really leave the limitations of POTS behind and start with a clean slate – there is no reason why our future audio communications should have any artificial limit (frequency response and/or audio type).
AAC-LD or AAC-ELD are the best choices, they are on the market, and mature.
Two different threads here–
1) Is Fraunhofer doing anything to promote the proliferation of HD voice/wideband these days, hmm?
2) If vendors rally around a standard above and beyond G.722, it would be nice…BUT right now the battle is getting G.722 SIP interoperability proliferated because that’s the biggest game in town. I hate to use the PC analogy, but if you think of G.722 as a Wintel PC it sorta works — it ain’t the best solution, but is the one everyone is adopting.
Frankly, I think we are at least three to five years out before “the market/the world” agrees on the next best thing beyond G.722 and AMR-WB. I’ve heard arguments for SILK, but I’m not really convinced yet…
AAC-LD is a heavy consumer of bandwidth and computation compared to SILK or AMR-WB, so it is a poor choice for wireless devices, which most phones are.
On the network side the wireless telcos (whose endpoints outnumber wireline endpoints two to one) are unlikely to adopt G.722 because it is a relative bandwidth hog and it’s not variable bit-rate, and they have already agreed on AMR-WB (3GPP) and EVRC-WB (3GPP2). So calls between wireless phones, or between a wireless phone and a wireline phone are extremely unlikely to use G.722. So G.722 is a non starter as a common codec – the most calls it could ever be used on is the relatively small (and decreasing) number of calls between two wireline endpoints.
Like AAC-LD, SILK is super-wideband, so better quality than G.722 or AMR-WB (aka G.722.2). Like G.722 SILK is royalty-free (AMR-WB bears a royalty), but SILK consumes much less bandwidth than G.722. With over 500 million downloads SILK is far more widely deployed than G.722 or AMR-WB, and with roughly 50 million regular users it is by far the most widely used wideband codec in voice communications (with the possible exception of iSAC, which is heavily used by QQ in China). SILK is far newer than either G.722 or AMR-WB, and it only became available to third parties this year, which may explain your impression that it is not “the one that everyone is adopting.” Now the move to end-to-end VoIP is in full swing, the decades long hard-wired limitation of an 8KHz sampling rate is going away. The voice codec market is becoming more dynamic. If G.722 is being designed into equipment this year we will see others next year – SILK and AMR-WB for sure. So on the device side, things may move faster than your three to five years.
The downsides of SILK are that it has not yet been standardized by the ITU (it is working through the IETF standardization process), and that its complexity (computation load) is greater than G.722, though not greater than AMR-WB. These seem minor going forward, especially since modern smartphone processors (like ARM Cortex) have media processing acceleration that reduces the computation load by a factor of three or four.
Nobody will adopt only one wideband codec. Most VoIP devices already support several narrowband codecs (G.711, G.729, G.726…), and similarly will need to support several wideband codecs: SILK, G.722 (for legacy compatibility), and AMR-WB for situations where the requirement for 3GPP compliance outweighs the burden of royalties. Other strong contenders in the royalty-free wideband codec stakes are the ITU codecs G.722.1 and G.722.1 Annex C (aka Siren and Siren-14), both designed by Polycom. The Polycom document in the link claims a complexity 1/6 of AMR-WB and 1/16 of AAC-LD. G.722.1 Annex C is also a super-wideband codec.