Ditech Communications is a veteran in the telecom space and they have some high-tech solutions to many carrier problems. I spent some time discussing their VoIP solutions and their strategy boils down to making VoIP sound better. They are able to cancel acoustic echo (the noise from the microphone reflection), background noise and hybrid echo (the echo that results from converting 4 lines of voice into two) for example.

They are also very focused on helping carriers with VoIP peering. In the VoIP space, different carriers use different formats to carry their voice packets. Cable companies, wireless providers, Skype, Vonage, etc… They all use their own format and when it comes to peering they have to find a way to interconnect the disparate voice networks.

One way is with a session border controller or media gateway. Some SBCs will handle this task and a media gateway based solution requires many DSP boards to be added which has drawbacks. Another more inexpensive option is Ditech Communications’ Packet Voice Processor. This category of product can also be referred to as border services platform. This company has been working with DSPs and transcoding since they were founded menaing they have lots of experiance.

In addition to transcoding Ditech Communications can improve voice quality at the same time so they have a solution that saves money, space and improves sound. They can also monitor voice quality in real time as opposed to some other companies that infer voice quality based on packet loss percentage against a look-up table. Many customers these days require MOS scores per call and SLAs to be met across each voice call.

In short as carrier networks peer more and more with one another you need solutions that enable transcoding of massive amounts of calls. Improving voice quality and being able to measure calls are a valuable plus. I suspect that helping carriers perfect VoIP peering will continue to be a rapidly growing market.