Asterisk to Support Polycom’s Siren7 and Siren14

Just a brief news item from my notes of the December 26 VUC call with Steve Sokol. We learned that Digium is planning support for Polycom’s Siren7 and Siren14 codecs in a future release of Asterisk v1.6. These are also known as G.722.1 and G.722.1 Annex C. They offer wideband calling at bitrates much lower than G.722 calls.

Siren14 supports bitrates of 24, 32 or 48 kbps and 14 khz passband making it equally well suited to music as voice applications. Siren7 supports bitrates of 16, 24 or 32 kbps with 7 khz passband.

These codecs are typically implemented in conferencing systems although they are not presently supported on the Polycom SoundPoint family of desktop IP phones. I’m happy to say that my employer recently purchased a Polycom IP6000 conference phone that supports both of these codecs. I further recall support for these in a soft phone I tried recently. Perhaps I might be able to do some experimentation with them one day soon.