Broadcom offers open source HD Voice

Broadcom announced that it will offer BroadVoice codecs open source in order to lower the price of HD voice and encourage the technology's growth.

The BroadVoice codecs come in two varieties: BroadVoice32 and BroadVoice16 for wideband and narrowband telephony respectively. The company is releasing the C source code under the LGPL license from the Free Software Foundation. In eliminating the royalties and licensing fees from BroadVoice, Broadcom hopes to push for a cost effective transition for users to HD VoIP applications.

While making high quality calling cheaper is admirable, GigaOm is a little skeptical that it will be a game-changing feature. They point out that consumers have placed more focus on mobility and cost over quality in recent pushes for lesser-quality VoIP and cell phones.

For more:
- read the GigaOM article

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