LG U+ and SPIRIT DSP Sign Deal to Enhance Voice Software

SPIRIT DSP, a leading voice and video over IP engines provider, announced that LG U+, South Korea’s leading mobile and telecommunications service provider, has signed a licensing agreement with SPIRIT DSP for Mobile VoIP and video engine.

LG U+, formerly known as LG Telecom, has licensed SPIRIT’s TeamSpirit Voice&Video Engine Mobile to power HD-quality VoIP and video-calling on mobile devices.

TeamSpirit Engine is a software development kit (SDK) for real-time IP calling/conferencing communications. It allows application developers and service providers to offer superior quality voice and video products to millions of global users.

By combining scalable echo- and noise-free audio with scalable video, the voice engine ensures the highest quality conferencing experience. TeamSpirit enables many hours of battery life in wideband talk mode. It also includes highly optimized standard voice codecs and a patent-free wideband error-resilient scalable SPIRIT IP-MR voice codec (IETF RFC 6262).

Featuring SPIRIT’s H.264 scalable video codec, the video engine is able to adapt streams to each peer’s network and PC environments without heavy transcoding. The solution also includes a multi-component stream protection module that compensates for network jitter and packet loss.

South Korea, with its robust communications infrastructure and highest broadband penetration, is considered as a vibrant IP communications market in the world. The country introduced a dedicated area zone for VoIP telephone numbers several years ago. Later it introduced number portability options that made it possible for people to move to VoIP-calling without changing their phone number.

The popularity of new smartphones from Korean handset OEM giants and high smartphone adoption rates also fueled VoIP adoption. In just 18 months, the number of smartphone subscribers in South Korea has exploded more than ten-fold to top 10 million, which comprises nearly a fifth of the population.

This explosive growth in the number of mobile subscribers has encouraged local carriers to deploy their own mobile VVoIP (voice and video over IP) services to retain their customers from migrating to Skype and Google mobile voice and video services.

“SPIRIT DSP has a strong presence in Asia Pacific market and S. Korea LG U+ has come to rely on SPIRIT’s proven and highly optimized, carrier-grade engine technology to handle voice and video over IP processing,” said SPIRIT’s VP Sales Alex Kravchenko, in a statement. “We’re pleased to continue our cooperation with LG U+ and maintain our critical role in bringing South Korean mobile users the highest quality communications experience possible.”

Earlier in July, SPIRIT DSP announced it has signed its fifth licensing agreement with Polycom, a global leader in videoconferencing hardware. Polycom has licensed SPIRIT’s product to support quality videoconferencing on the Polycom CX5000 Unified Conference Station.

Rajani Baburajan is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Rajani’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Juliana Kenny