NSN offers enhanced voice quality on GSM

ESPOO, FINLAND: Nokia Siemens Networks has announced that it has conducted the world’s first pre-commercial call, exploiting its Orthogonal Sub-Channel Dual Full Rate (OSC-DFR) software feature for GSM networks.

According to the network giant, with this feature, GSM operators can enjoy the twin benefits of up to 100 per cent increase in voice capacity and significantly enhanced speech quality. GSM is by far the most widespread mobile technology with over 4 billion subscriptions worldwide.

“The new feature builds on our OSC innovation of 2009, and extends its capabilities by offering better speech quality along with an increase in voice handling capacity,” said Kimmo Virkki, head of GSM product management at Nokia Siemens Networks. “OSC-DFR can reduce capital and operations expenditure for operators as it requires fewer carrier units and base station sites as well as less transport capacity. Moreover, the OSC-DFR feature allows operators to accommodate more voice and data traffic into the existing spectrum, thus facilitating the reuse or refarming of 3G/LTE services in GSM frequency bands.”

Operators who have deployed the commonly used Adaptive Multi Rate-Full Rate (AMR FR) in their networks can use the OSC-DFR feature to achieve unmatched speech quality and at the same time can nearly double their voice capacity.

Nokia Siemens Networks’ new GSM feature will be used in customer pilots from the end of June 2011.