Global IP Sound (GIPS) today announced that several leading companies in the VoIP market will be integrating its iLBC voice codec into their products. The newest users of the royalty-free codec include HelloSoft and CIRPACK, among others.

"Clearly, there is widespread demand for high-quality voice across every imaginable application and platform in the VoIP marketplace," said Gary P. Hermansen, President and CEO of Global IP Sound. "GIPS reach is extending into every corner of the world, and we will continue to work to serve the needs of our global customers."

These newest customers, who join other well-known companies such as Texas Instruments and AudioCodes on the growing roster of iLBC-enabled solutions, are planning to implement iLBC in a variety of existing and next-generation voice switches, gateways, and VoIP software solutions for various VoIP client devices. All of the solutions that integrate iLBC have the advantage of being interoperable with other iLBC-enabled products, allowing for high-quality VoIP communications across various platforms.

"As the largest supplier of the most optimized embedded VoIP software stack for various VoIP end points and chipsets, our customers expect us to be able to communicate across multiple platforms and within a variety of environments," said Muhammad Helal, Vice President, Marketing and worldwide sales at HelloSoft. "GIPS iLBC helps us to remain competitive by providing us with the most advanced voice capabilities available in the market today and by delivering a solution that, as an industry standard, provides unsurpassed interoperability."

The iLBC codec remains the industry's only solution ever to be standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and is designated by Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. (CableLabs®), a nonprofit research and development consortium, as a mandatory component of PacketCable voice-over-cable telephony systems. The solution offers superior speech quality and packet loss robustness compared to other low bit rate codecs. For instance, GIPS iLBC delivers speech quality better than the G.729A codec and equal to the G.729E codec, while offering substantially better quality over congested networks plagued by packet loss.