Back in the days when Arpanet was a adventurous experiment under the guidance of Bolt Beranek & Newman Inc, and packet switching was fun, they tried some pretty nifty experiments in packetising digitised speech to find out whether it would be intelligible, with some surprisingly encouraging results. Those times are long gone, but Micom Systems Inc believes that packetised voice is an idea whose time has come. The company this week announced the first application of its proprietary Advanced Packetised Voice, APV, technology. Oneliner is a 56Kbit-per-second integrated voice and data multiplexor claimed to offer users a cost-effective, easy-to-implement solution for integrating data and speech transmission over a single 56Kbps digital circuit. The key point is that hitherto, integration of digital speech and data required expensive 1.544Mbit-per-second T1 circuits and equipment, making it uneconomical for lower-volume users, and narrow bandwidth speech digitising techniques resulted in severe compromises in voice quality. Oneliner multiplexes multiple synchronous and asynchronous data channels and up to four 9.6Kbps speech channels over a single 56Kbps digital circuit. Each speech card provides two digital voice channels. Micom says that special use of certain algorithms, implemented in digital signal processors, makes maximum use of channel bandwidth to provide high-quality speech transmission at low data rates. Oneliner is the first of a family of voice packetising products that Micom has planned for the digital wideband market. Micom has a range of configurations at prices from $4,635.
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