VoiceAge Announces the Creation of a Patent Pool for AMR-WB/G.722.2 Speech Compression Standards

MONTREAL -

VoiceAge Corporation announced today its initiative to create a patent pool of essential AMR-WB/G.722.2 patents. Both Ericsson and Nokia, who are major contributors to AMR-WB/G.722.2 Standards, foster the realization of this patent pool in order to provide users with convenient, fair, reasonable and non discriminatory access to a portfolio of essential worldwide patents under a single license agreement.

AMR Wideband (AMR-WB) is the only speech codec to date to be standardized for both wireless (3GPP) and wireline (ITU-T Recommendation G.722.2) applications. It is therefore the ideal codec for wideband speech applications as it ensures compatibility across converging wireline/wireless networks. AMR-WB is the only wideband speech standard adopted by 3GPP and is the mandatory codec in GSM and WCDMA networks for wideband speech and for multimedia services when wideband speech (with 16 kHz sampling frequency) is supported - including Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), IMS Messaging and Presence services, Packet-Switched Streaming (PSS), Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (MBMS) and Push-to-talk over Cellular (PoC). Other applications include VoIP, conferencing, Wi-Fi telephony, satellite telephony, video telephony, streaming audio over the internet, and many others.

“As more and more wireless and wireline applications are adopting AMR-WB/G.722.2 for their wideband applications and services, it became imperative to establish, without delay, a joint licensing program and make available a market enabling royalty structure to the industry,” said VoiceAge President Laurent Amar.

A patent call will shortly be issued to invite companies who believe they have patents that are necessary to the practice of AMR-WB and G.722.2 Standards and who wish to participate in the AMR-WB/G.722.2 patent pool. They will be requested to submit their patents for essentiality evaluation by an independent third party evaluator.

Parties that are interested in obtaining further information on the AMR-WB/G.722.2 licensing program and the availability of the patent call are invited to contact VoiceAge Corporation at licensing@voiceage.com or visit our website at www.voiceage.com.

The AMR-W/G.722.2 patent license agreement is expected to be available in Q3 2009.

About VoiceAge Corporation

VoiceAge Corporation is a forerunner in the development and dissemination of speech and audio compression technologies and solutions for the Internet (VoIP), wireless (cellular 2G, 2.5G, 3G and Wi-Fi and WiMAX) and fixed/mobile converged networks. Our active participation in the development of numerous international telecommunication standards and our extensive ongoing experience as developers of codec implementations for diverse platforms and environments have nurtured world-class expertise that we bring to each new project. Today VoiceAge(R) speech and audio codec solutions, using designs based on our flagship ACELP(R) technology platform, deliver unsurpassed quality experienced daily by hundreds of millions of users worldwide. VoiceAge is the licensing administrator for the AMR and AMR-WB+ patent pools.

Source: VoiceAge Corporation

VoiceAge Marketing, +1-514-737-4940, marketing at voiceage.com