Toshiba in ITU G.729 Consortium

MONTREAL, CANADA: Sipro Lab Telecom (Sipro), the G.729 Patent Pool Licensing Administrator, announced that Toshiba Corp. has joined the G.729 Consortium.

The G.729 Consortium represents and pools together the intellectual property rights (IPR) essential to the ITU-T standard of France Telecom, Mitsubishi Electric Corp. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation Universite de Sherbrooke, and Toshiba Corp. in the areas of speech coding and processing solutions.

Sipro now represents the IPR portfolio of five major telecommunication innovators related to the G.729 technology on a worldwide basis.

"Adding Toshiba's IPR to the Patent Pool license delivers added value for all existing and potential future licensees of the IPR represented by the G.729 Consortium which through its licensing agent, Sipro, provides a single point of contact to a more comprehensive pool of essential patents," says Catharie Bechamp, Sipro's Vice President Licensing.

Sipro and the G.729 Consortium have agreed to maintain the current Patent Pool licensing terms and rates with the added value of Toshiba's essential patents to ease the continued use of this proven speech coding solution by the telecommunication industry.

The G.729 standard and its annexes, an ITU (International Telecommunication Union) approved recommendation, provides the telecommunication industry with a low bit rate speech coding solution.

In today's market, G.729 is found in equipment and applications such as VoIP gateways, IP phones, videoconferencing and teleconferencing, unified messaging, Internet telephony, and other applications where the quality of service, delay and bandwidth are important.