Royalty payments and license fees are required to use other voice codecs, Broadcom said. Clearly the provision of voice codecs free of charge could help drive system developers towards using Broadcom-based solutions.

The company said it is releasing its wideband and narrowband BroadVoice codecs in both floating-point and fixed-point C code as open source software under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), version 2.1, as published by the Free Software Foundation.

Broadcom said that by eliminating the royalties and licensing fees it hopes to drive a transition to high-definition voice-over IP. The BroadVoice family of voice codecs comes in two variants: a 32-kbit/s version called BroadVoice32 for wideband speech sampled at 16-kHz, and a 16-kbit/s version called BroadVoice16 for narrowband telephone-bandwidth speech sampled at 8-kHz.

The codec is suitable for use in voice-over-cable, voice-over-DSL, Ethernet IP phones, Wi-Fi VoIP phones and software-based VoIP clients. When standardized by SCTE and ANSI, the BroadVoice16 and BroadVoice32 codecs are called BV16 and BV32, respectively.

Related links and articles:

www.broadcom.com/broadvoice

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