Nokia Announces Speech Codec Standard for 3G CDMA Networks

Nokia has come out with a CDMA2000 wideband speech codec compliant with standard developed with the 3GPP2/TIA. The company reports that its Variable-rate Multimode Wideband speech codec (VMR-WB) is fully interoperable with 3GPP/AMR-WB, the standard in GSM and WCDMA networks. Nokia said the codec also has been characterized and specified by 3GPP2.

The VMR-WB standard enables multimode wideband and narrowband speech processing capability through a single software application. Nokia officials contend that the standard delivers a higher voice quality and that it can perform under severe channel error and background noise conditions. The standard works in circuit-switched and packet-switched multimedia applications, including VoIP, mobile-to-mobile conversational voice services, and multimedia messaging and streaming services.

3GPP2 and TIA have published the algorithmic specification of VMR-WB standard as 3GPP2 C.S0052-0 v1.0 and TIA-1016, respectively. The spec and its software will be available through these organizations and Nokia.