Voxox Announces Limited Release of VoIP Codec

Voxox, which has gathered a following for its cloud-based unified communications (UC) development platform, delivered in the platform-as-a-service model, now is rewarding its current customer base of service providers and original equipment manufacturers with a new voice-over-IP (VoIP) codec.

The codec appears to be in working order but is not quite ready for a full commercial release. It will undergo some demonstrations at industry events such as the Mobile World Congress – taking place this week – in order to build hype for its release and to demonstrate its digital voice packet handling capabilities. The tool will allow companies to craft their own business VoIP services that they can extend to customers.

Bryan Hertz, the CEO and co-founder of Voxox, has more about his company’s basic intention with this release.

“We believe in handcrafting communication technology that integrates naturally into the lives and habits of our customers and improves the quality and effectiveness of their interactions,” Hertz said. “Our new innovative codec is just one element of our platform-as-a-service infrastructure, which is designed to help partners build best of breed unified communication experiences.”

Voxox, in its announcement, speaks about the primary problems operators can experience when offering IP-based voice: latency and packet loss. The way that VoIP works is that it translates sounds waves into data packets. It grabs the information from a caller when he speaks and then sends those packets through the Internet or local networks to a recipient. Since a large number of individual packets must join together to represent coherent speech, it is necessary that all or many of those packets traverse the expanse of a call.

Assuming that the recipient receives all of the data packets one after another in the order they were sent and within a reasonable amount of time from when they were sent, the call will be clear and timely. If, however, the recipient must wait a long time to receive the packets or only receives a select number of packets, she can experience latency and packet loss. This can result in a long wait for a reply from the caller, which can be frustrating and act as a hindrance to business operations, and it can cause the recipient to literally lose parts of the conversation because the network did not deliver them.

It becomes the operator’s responsibility to remedy those problems. They can utilize a number of techniques to minimize latency and packet loss. Voxox has indicated that it has built its new codec with the ability to handle packet loss percentages up to 40 percent while still keeping calls usable. This means its codec can perform well in geographical areas where bandwidth is poor or in congested locations where a high number of individuals consistently use the same network and flood it with requests for data – a main cause of packet loss.

Voxox has not said when it will release the codec to a wider user base. For the time being, its current partners will have the chance to make the most out of their VoIP setups and try to capitalize on their own broadband connections.

Edited by Maurice Nagle