POLQA chosen as voice standard for HD Voice, 3G, and 4G/LTE

PESQ has been the state-of-the-art benchmark for almost every telecom service worldwide over the last 10 years.

-- Test & Measurement World, 7/27/2010 7:05:00 AM

Opticom, SwissQual, and TNO announced that POLQA, a voice-quality testing technique, has been selected to form the new ITU-T voice-quality standard to be used with HD Voice, 3G, and 4G/LTE. POLQA is the winner of a rigorous technical competition carried out by ITU-T in order to define a technology update for PESQ/P.862. PESQ has been the state-of-the-art benchmark for almost every telecom service worldwide over the last 10 years.

POLQA, which stands for Perceptual Objective Listening Quality Analysis, will offer a new level of benchmarking capability to determine the voice quality of mobile network services. The unified solution to be released jointly by Opticom, SwissQual, and TNO was selected after the underlying algorithms were subjected to extensive tests against more than 45,000 speech samples from a broad range of targeted usage scenarios. This wide array of tests covers the entire range of today's fixed, mobile, and IP-based voice services having conventional telephony quality with limited 3.4-kHz audible bandwidth.

The POLQA coalition formed by Opticom, SwissQual, and TNO is the outcome of the competitive standardization process run by the ITU-T. An expert group within ITU-T spent more than four years evaluating various candidate algorithms to find a suitable successor to older standards. The candidate models submitted for testing by Opticom, SwissQual, and TNO were the only algorithms that clearly met the criteria in the ITU-T selection phase in June, 2010, and the companies have agreed to combine their expertise into a joint solution. This joint solution is expected to be standardized in September, 2010, and made available commercially in an aligned release process during September.

Opticom, www.opticom.de, SwissQual, www.swissqual.com, and TNO, www.tno.nl.