Broadcom to provide BroadVoice voice codecs free

LONDON, UK: Broadcom Corporation, the company making communications chips, based in Irvine, California, the United States, has announced that it will make available its BroadVoice family of voice codecs free of charge.

Royalty and licence fees have to be paid to use other voice codecs, Broadcom Corporation said in a statement, adding that providing voice codecs free of charge could help encourage system developers use Broadcom-based solutions.

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

By doing away with the royalties and licensing fees, Broadcom Corporation said it hopes to impel a changeover to high-definition voice-over IP.

There are two variants for the BroadVoice family of voice codecs – a 32-kbit/s version (named 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.)

Broadcom Corporation’s BroadVoice codecs are meant for use in voice-over-DSL, voice-over-cable, Wi-Fi VoIP phones, Ethernet IP phones, as well as software-based VoIP clients.

The BroadVoice16 codec is called BV16, and the BroadVoice32 codec is called BV32, when standardized by SCTE and ANSI.