Offering "improved scalability," officials at Howler Technologies (News - Alert) say their new embedded and distributed license manager "allows for flexible licensing options," including a Floating License which "allows you to pool channel licenses across several servers on a network segment."

Little background for us non-techies:

According to TMC's (News - Alert) resident wizard on the topic of HD voice technology, Doug Mohney, the human ear captures sound in a range of 20Hz to 20,000Hz. A PSTN (standard phone technology) call only can send and receive sound in a fairly narrow range of 300Hz to 3400Hz.

How old is this standard? Goes back to the halcyon days of 1937 when the original phone system was being built, Mohney says. Now that, my friends, is legacy technology. 

So using the G.722 codec as a generally accepted baseline standard for HD voice - "yes, there are other HD codecs, but G.722 is the grand daddy," Mohney says -- handles sound in the range of 50Hz to 7,000 Hz. Or, Mohney notes, "roughly double that of narrowband, hence the term 'wideband'.'  

What the good folk over at Howler say is that the G.729 Codec is an industry standard algorithm that compresses and decompresses a digital audio stream. Applied to Voice over IP (VoIP) calls, G.729 compresses the audio data to use significantly less network bandwidth than a standard or uncompressed VoIP call. 

"Instead of the 64kbit/s required for a standard, uncompressed G.711 PCM audio data stream, the G.729 codec compresses the payload to 8kbit/s," they say. "This compression allows for more calls to be carried without increasing network capacity and allows voice to travel on limited-bandwidth connections that would otherwise not support VoIP."

Howler officials say the release "delivers a high-performance G.729A implementation and ships as a drop-in binary module for ease of deployment." It is compatible with Asterisk (News - Alert), FreeSWITCH, CallWeaver, Elastix, Trixbox and Switchvox.