BroadVoice® 16: A PacketCable Speech Coding Standard for Cable Telephony

This paper presents the BroadVoice16 (BV16) speech codec, which is a mandatory codec in the PacketCable 1.5 standard. For cable telephony based on PacketCable 1.5, BV16 possesses a set of attributes not met by other speech codecs: (1) no royalty, (2) high quality, (3) low delay, (4) low complexity, and (5) medium to low bit-rate. The royalty-free requirement excludes many modern speech coding techniques. Hence, an older paradigm is resurrected and improved as the foundation of BV16. Extensive test results including independent subjective tests, PESQ evaluation across 13 languages, and DTMF pass-through evaluation demonstrate the high performance of BV16.