FOR INFORMATION
March 12, 1998
NTT Forms ITU-T G. 729 Consortium
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), together with France Telecom and the Universite
de Sherbrooke (Quebec, Canada) established the G. 729 Consortium to simplify the licensing process
for the international standard of digital audio coding and decoding, the ITU-T G.729, and to encourage
widespread adoption of the G. 729 and G. 729 Annex A standards. The Consortium also agreed to appoint
a single Licensing Agent - Sipro Lab Telecom.
Background
G. 729 is an international standard adopted by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU),
a United Nations organization, that enables digital audio compression for transmission and storage.
The benefits of undistorted, toll-quality speech ensured by this standard make it a popular choice
for many applications such as teleconferencing, visual telephony, voice over Internet, cellular
phones and other wireless applications where quality, delay and bandwidth are important.
The creation of high-end codecs (G. 729 and G. 729 Annex A) required the involvement of the leaders
of the telecommunications industry. As a result, the complexity of negotiating individual patent
rights and copyrights with each owner of the intellectual property has discouraged potential users
and slowed the widespread adoption of the standard.
Objective
The establishment of the G. 729 Consortium pools the G. 729 patents and copyrights of two companies
andone university to enable "one stop shopping" for the licenses desired by the telecommunications
industry. The establishment of this consortium will speed up the development of Large-Scale
Integrated Circuits(LSIs), software and other products using the G. 729 standard.
NTT's role in the Consortium
NTT, together with the two other organizations, was a major joint developer of the ITU-T G.729,
and holds a number of essential patents for the manufacture of G.729 standard-based products
(basic patents for voice analysis technology, parameter expression technology and quantization
technology). To facilitate its use, the Consortium has created a single contact for all inquiries
regarding the licensing of G. 729 to facilitate a unified and fair licensing procedure. As a result,
NTT will help promote a more active telecommunications market through the widespread adoption
of its R&D achievements, bringing the entire telecommunications industry one step further in its
technological advancement.
Future Plans
In the future, we hope to attract more members to the G. 729 Consortium to further promote the
widespread use of the standard. In addition, the Consortium is planning to enable a similar procedure
for further Annexes of G.729.
Reference
G. 729
The G. 729 standard, also referred to as CS-ACELP, was adopted by the ITU in 1995. Similar in quality
to the 32 kbps ADPCM (G. 726), G. 729 offers high quality, distortion-free speech transmission.
Furthermore, because it is an 8 kbps codec, G. 729 offers opportunities for significant increases in
bandwidth utilization to existing telephony and wireless applications.Operating on 10 ms frames,
this multi-purpose standard also permits moderate transmission delays.
G. 729 Annex A
The codec, established as a DSVD (Digital Simultaneous Voice & Data) official international standard
by the ITU for the modem industry, was presented by the UniversitE de Sherbrooke in collaboration
with Sipro Lab Telecom. G.729 Annex A opens the door to voice via fax, Internet and e mail. The high-
quality codec is based on the CS-ACELP system.
This 8 kbps codec offers remarkable features, such as:
- low complexity (MIPS, RAM, ROM)
- low delay (10 ms)
- toll quality
- interoperability with G. 729
This last feature is important because G. 729 is now more than ever becoming the worldwide standard
for the telephone industry. The interoperability has the advantage of eliminating the need for
transcoding. Signal quality is thus preserved and maximized. We foresee a day that when all
multimedia systems will be made compatible with G. 729 Annex A.
Sipro Lab Telecom
Sipro Lab Telecom Inc., a Canadian company, has been the commercial representative for Universite
de Sherbrooke Speech Compression Laboratory and its ACELP (Algebraic Code Exited Linear Prediction)
technology since 1993. A Sipro Lab Telecom representative can be reached by phone at1-514-727-
5874, by fax at 1-514-737-2327, by email at sales@sipro.com, or through its homepage at http://www.
sipro.com/.. For license details, licensing applications or an application for participation in the
Consortium, please contact Sipro Lab Telecom, Inc.
