Polycom White Paper On Wideband Voice Codecs

As I prepared for my travels this week I stuffed a bunch of papers into my bag not really noticing what was in the stack. As I am presently on an airplane en route from San Francisco to Seattle I had an opportunity to review what I’d brought and came upon a white paper from Polycom Co-Founder & CTO Jeff Rodman entitled “VoIP to 20 kHz: Codec Choices for High Definition Voice Telephony.”

This paper which was released in July 2008 is freely available on their web site and is an excellent overview of the state of the codec world and the potential for better-than-PSTN-quality IP telephony. It takes a well balanced view of existing codecs, their ability to convey audio bandwidth, latencies, target applications, network bandwidth and processor load requirements. It gives a significant amount of detail while presenting the information in language that even a non-technical manager will appreciate.

If you have any interest in the future of IP telephony it’s definitely worth a read.