Popular Telephony and Global IP Sound have announced a partnernership to provide best-in-class voice quality on Peerio 444 serverless softphone. I've used Global IP Sound's GIPS codecs and they are very impressive. I gave Global IP Sound a glowing review in a TMC Labs writeup last year, which you can see here: Global IP Sound TMC Labs Review

We found that the Global IP Sound codec had some pretty interesting positive effects under high packet loss conditions, which we tested using the Shunra Cloud 4.0 network emulator tool which can inject latency and packet loss. I should note that we used an older/slower PocketPC with a softphone client containing the GIPS codec engine, so the latency numbers are much higher than a PC or hardphone would have. But it's all relative, so if we see an improvement with GIPS on a PocketPC using GIPS, then that improvement will also happen on products that have much lower baseline latency numbers.

Here's an excerpt of the review worth sharing here:
We performed several tests using all of the various codecs with no packet loss. Then, using Shunra’s Cloud 4.0, we induced 25 percent and 50 percent packet loss to see how that would affect the latency (Table 2).

We noticed an interesting thing when we examined the calculations in the tables. When testing PC-to-iPaq latency, at 0 percent packet loss, the latency was 204ms, and then as expected, increased a bit to 392ms when we set the packet loss to 25 percent. However, unexpectedly, when we increased the packet loss to 50 percent, the latency went down to 211ms. Similarly, when testing iPaq-to-PC latency, we calculated 344ms at 0 percent packet loss, but the latency decreased to 259ms at 25 percent packet loss and decreased even further to 230ms at 50 percent packet loss. Seems a bit counter-intuitive, however, we believe this to be due to the design of Global IP Sound’s codec, perhaps having to do something with packet re-transmissions or adjusting of the jitter buffer.

Kinda funky that more packet loss resulted in lower latency numbers, eh?

Global IP Sound has signed some big deals with some major players (Nortel, WebEx, and more) since their codecs handle packet loss so well. So I commend Popular Telephony for choosing Global IP Sound for their VoIP codecs.

I should mention that someone posted a comment on my blog asking where the Peerio444 software client was, since it wasn't on Popular Telephony's website. I also received a couple of emails asking the same thing. Well, I can't say exactly when the Peerio444 client will be released, since I'm under NDA, but let's just say it's very soon. Keep your eye out here or keep checking Popular Telephony's website.

Here's the press release:
(Sophia Antipolis, France October 13, 2004) Popular Telephony Inc, a telecommunications middleware company and Global IP Sound, the leading provider of embedded voice processing solutions for real-time communications, today launched a partnership that will bring together the world’s leading sound processing technology and the world’s first truly serverless peer-to-peer telephony application.

Popular Telephony has chosen Global IP Sound’s VoiceEngine to be the voice processing technology of choice for Peerio444™ and PeerioBiz™, both innovative soft clients for server-free peer-to-peer telephony, based on Peerio™ - the company’s patents-pending core technology that enables serverless communications.

Peerio444™, announced earlier this year, is a first, forever-free serverless telephony system for consumers, provided to them as open-source for various platforms, including Windows, MacOS and Linux. Peerio444™ allows users to make unlimited, free calls to other PCs, including other H.323 and SIP enabled VoIP clients and Peerio-enabled IP phones, as well as low-cost PC-to-phone calls.

PeerioBiz is a full-featured soft client version for the enterprise, bringing serverless telephony capabilities to the desktop. Designed to be used as a primary or additional desktop telephone, PeerioBiz is an important element in the creation and deployment wide-scale serverless IP telephony within the enterprise network.

Global IP Sound’s flagship product, VoiceEngine, handles all voice-related tasks for VoIP soft clients in both the personal computer (PC) and personal digital assistant (PDA) environments. VoiceEngine combines award-winning and patented technologies together with a high-level API to enable simplified and rapid integration of complex sound processing software.

Both Peerio applications will be the first Popular Telephony products featuring the Global IP Sound Voice Engine thereby providing the best sound quality available of any softphone platform available today. Additionally, Popular Telephony’s Peerio middleware on “C’est Peerio™” hardware phones and xDSL modems will also use the same Global IP Sound Voice Engine.

“We at Popular Telephony are setting the standards for serverless communications, and are committing to bringing to market the best possible quality solutions. Whatever products we deliver – they need to meet our stringent quality standards. Obviously we’re very excited to partner with Global IP Sound to incorporate the best voice technology with our revolutionary middleware, offering consumers a true alternative to a traditional telephony,” says Dmitry Goroshevsky, CEO of Popular Telephony and the creator of the Peerio server-less architecture.

“As the peer-to-peer market grows it is apparent that need for high quality voice is an absolute requirement,” says Gary Hermansen, CEO of Global IP Sound. “Working with Popular Telephony assures that the users of Popular Telephony’s solution will be able to have better than PSTN quality in their voice communications.”