MONTREAL, July 21 --
VoiceAge Corporation announced today its initiative to create a patent pool of
essential AMR-WB/G.722.2 patents. Both Ericsson and Nokia, who are major
contributors to AMR-WB/G.722.2 Standards, foster the realization of this patent
pool in order to provide users with convenient, fair, reasonable and non
discriminatory access to a portfolio of essential worldwide patents under a
single license agreement.
AMR Wideband (AMR-WB) is the only speech codec to date to be standardized for
both wireless (3GPP) and wireline (ITU-T Recommendation G.722.2) applications.
It is therefore the ideal codec for wideband speech applications as it ensures
compatibility across converging wireline/wireless networks. AMR-WB is the only
wideband speech standard adopted by 3GPP and is the mandatory codec in GSM and
WCDMA networks for wideband speech and for multimedia services when wideband
speech (with 16 kHz sampling frequency) is supported - including Multimedia
Messaging Service (MMS), IMS Messaging and Presence services, Packet-Switched
Streaming (PSS), Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (MBMS) and Push-to-talk
over Cellular (PoC). Other applications include VoIP, conferencing, Wi-Fi
telephony, satellite telephony, video telephony, streaming audio over the
internet, and many others.
As more and more wireless and wireline applications are adopting AMR-WB/G.722.2
for their wideband applications and services, it became imperative to establish,
without delay, a joint licensing program and make available a market enabling
royalty structure to the industry, said VoiceAge President Laurent Amar.
A patent call will shortly be issued to invite companies who believe they have
patents that are necessary to the practice of AMR-WB and G.722.2 Standards and
who wish to participate in the AMR-WB/G.722.2 patent pool. They will be
requested to submit their patents for essentiality evaluation by an independent
third party evaluator.
Parties that are interested in obtaining further information on the
AMR-WB/G.722.2 licensing program and the availability of the patent call are
invited to contact VoiceAge Corporation at licensing@voiceage.com or visit our
website at www.voiceage.com.
The AMR-W/G.722.2 patent license agreement is expected to be available in Q3
2009.
About VoiceAge Corporation
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) and fixed/mobile converged
networks. Our active participation in the development of numerous international
telecommunication standards 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(R)
speech and audio codec solutions, using designs based on our flagship ACELP(R)
technology platform, deliver unsurpassed quality experienced daily by hundreds
of millions of users worldwide. VoiceAge is the licensing administrator for the
AMR and AMR-WB+ patent pools.
SOURCE: VoiceAge Corporation
VoiceAge Marketing, +1-514-737-4940, marketing@voiceage.com
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