After a four year process led by ITU-T, three companies have pooled their resources to create a new standard to address next generation voice quality.
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Opticom, SwissQual and TNO have combined to create the test standard, POLQA – which stands for “Perceptual Objective Listening Quality Analysis”. The standard updates the current standard, PESQ/P.862.
The POLQA coalition is the outcome of a competitive standardisation process run by the ITU- T. An expert group within ITU-T spent more than four years evaluating various candidate algorithms to find a suitable successor to older standards. The joint solution is expected to be standardised and made available commercially in an aligned release process during September 2010.
The three partners involved claim that POLQA will offer immediate, strong support for testing of new wideband 4G/LTE networks delivering HD-quality voice services. Tests carried out during the POLQA evaluation also included future technologies such as Unified Communications, Next Gen Networks and 4G/LTE, which might support HD Voice, i.e. “wide-band” and “super-wide-band” telephone calls of 7kHz and 14kHz frequency range. 

TNO’s Senior Researcher Dr. John Beerends, who introduced the first perceptual speech quality metrics to the ITU-T in 1996 and was co-author of the PESQ standard stated: “We received a clear message from the telecoms industry, demanding a uniform successor of the PESQ standard, and I’m delighted that the rigorous testing that has gone into this evaluation shows clearly that the jointly-developed POLQA solution will be superior to existing and alternative approaches.”After a four year process within ITU-T, the standards sector of the ITU, three companies have merged their technology to create a single voice quality standard for next generation voice – including HD Voice, 3G and 4G/LTE.
“Over the last ten years test and measurement vendors have widely adopted ITU-T Recommendation P.862/PESQ and there are now more than 20.000 installations worldwide,” explains Michael Keyhl, Founder and CEO of OPTICOM. “However, recently developed speech codecs for 3G and 4G, and new techniques for delivering an enhanced voice quality experience have generated strong demand for an update to this industry standard. POLQA is the answer the industry has been looking for.”