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A Business Rationale

The G.729 standard, an ITU-T (International Telecommunication Union) approved recommendation, provides the telecommunication industry with a low bit rate 8 kb/s speech coding algorithm with wireline quality, fulfilling today’s quest for bandwidth, quality of service, and cost containment. Various technical and commercial advantages are driving companies to use the CS-ACELP-based ITU-T G.729 codec for voice transmission. G.729 is the only audio compression standard to offer a structured solution, in the form of an IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) pool, to facilitate licensing.

Technical highlights

G.729
G.729A
G.729D
G.729E
Bitrate

8 kb/s

8 kb/s

6.4 kb/s

11.8 kb/s

Type
CS-ACELP
CS-ACELP
CS-ACELP
CS-ACELP

Delay

Frame size
Lookahead
Quality

 

10ms
5ms
toll

 

10ms
5ms
toll

 

10ms
5ms
toll

 

10ms
5ms
toll

Complexity

MIPS
RAM

 

20-25
<4K

 

10
<4K

 

Less than G.729
Less than G.729

 

~30
~4K

Attributes

  • The lowest bit rate (8 kb/s) ITU-T standard with toll quality.

  • One of the most tested standards for all applications, including wireless.

  • Bit-exactness ensures that regardless of implementation, the same level of quality will be preserved.

  • Quality is less affected by error transmission relative to other low bit rate vocoders.

  • A mainstream codec of the ITU-T, with ongoing development as demonstrated by its annexes:

    • Annex A: DSVD (Digital Simultaneous Voice and Data)

    • Annex B: VAD/CNG/DTX
      (Voice Activity Detection/Comfort NoiseGenerator/Discontinuous Transmission)

    • Annex C: Floating point version of G.729 and its annexes

    • Annex D: Extension at 6.4 kb/s

    • Annex E: Extension at 11.8 kb/s

  • Annex A offers the best complexity/quality ratio of the industry.

  • Is one of the vocoders—and the only low bit rate codec—recommended by the Frame Relay Forum FRF.11. A potential low-bit rate codec candidate for packet cable. Also being considered by other forums.

Benefits
Delay, bit rate, and quality are the attributes that promote the use of G.729 because these attributes generate user benefits such as quality of service, interoperability, and increased bandwidth.
 
Quality of service
Because of its low processing delay (frame size of 10ms), G.729 is well designed to offer telephone-quality voice over systems.

  • Speech quality is not sensitive to the distance between telephones that communicate over the system or over satellite links

  • The codec is easily adaptable for communications over packet communications systems, such as frame relay or asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), that are designed to deliver the lowest practicable transport delay

  • As networks are becoming more efficient and latency is diminishing, delay is an increasingly critical issue for competing with traditional service providers and for offering toll-quality speech over existing networks.

Interoperability 
Upgrading a network to add bandwidth is a costly investment. Vendors are well-advised to offer standardized products that are interoperable with other manufacturers’ equipment to guarantee investment protection for their customers.

Economy of bandwidth (bit rate) 
Companies are in need of increased network bandwidth for voice and data communications, improved performance, and low prices. Service providers and equipment manufacturers have to meet these requirements while maintaining low costs.

  • G.729 defines a voice quality equivalent to the Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN) while consuming only 8 kb/s, thus multiplying by eight the actual network capacity while maintaining telephone service provider quality

  • Annexes D and E allow an adaptive variable bit rate to operate in circuit multiplication equipment. Thus, during periods of congestion, operation can continue at 6.4 kb/s with a minimal degradation of speech quality. And when bandwidth is available, the bit rate can increase to 11.8 kb/s to improve performance in the presence of background noise and music.

  • Cost reductions can be obtained by interleaving voice traffic with data to maximize data networks at little or no additional transport cost and with little or no impact on application performance.

G.729 one-stop-shopping
Sipro Lab Telecom, a Canadian corporation, holds two licensing mandates: we are the exclusive Licensing Agent mandated by the members of the G.729 Consortium and the Licensing Agent mandated by the individual owners of essential IPRs.

In this double role, Sipro Lab Telecom pursues its objective to promote and facilitate access to the G.729 technology in two ways: by simplifying the licensing process with various entities and by keeping the IPR owners up to date on the ability of the market to pay for IPR licenses, therefore ensuring that prices remain market driven.

Our role as Licensing Agent for the Consortium
The G.729 Consortium is an IPR pool currently ratified by France Telecom, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Toshiba Corporation and Université de Sherbrooke. Sipro Lab Telecom is in charge of the licensing process to G.729 rights on behalf of the owners and thus acts as an intermediary between the owners and the licensees. In addition, Sipro is in a position to represent the concerns of the Licensees to the owners, facilitating the negotiation of licenses from commercial and legal perspectives.

In conclusion...
The G.729 ITU-T standard is an optimum choice in view of voice communication requirements for compressed speech quality and bandwidth requirements for reasonable delay. In part, the success of this codec can be attributed to the tremendous effort put forward by the IPR owners and Sipro Lab Telecom to facilitate access to licensing and to promote market-driven pricing.