OPTICOM, SwissQual and TNO win ITU Competition and announce POLQA, the Next

The POLQA coalition formed by OPTICOM, SwissQual and TNO is the outcome of the competitive standardization process run by the ITU-T (International Telecommunication Union - Telecoms). An expert group within ITU-T spent more than four years evaluating various candidate algorithms to find a suitable successor to older standards. The candidate models submitted for testing by OPTICOM, SwissQual and TNO were the only algorithms that clearly met the criteria in the ITU-T selection phase in June 2010, and OPTICOM, SwissQual and TNO have agreed to combine their expertise into a joint solution. This joint solution is expected to be standardized in September 2010.

"An enormous amount of effort has gone into ensuring POLQA works quickly and accurately. For example, more than 100,000 samples of mobile and VoIP phone calls were used to train and optimize the POLQA algorithm,” said Dr. Jens Berger, Head of Applied Research at SwissQual. “POLQA is superior to existing standards, and clearly has overcome all known issues and limitations of PESQ.”

The limitations of existing standards that are now addressed by POLQA became obvious in benchmarks of the CDMA and Chinese 3G TD-SCDMA networks, when employing specific speech codecs. POLQA will also 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 7 kHz and 14 kHz frequency range. The arrival of HD Voice capabilities is expected to signal the demise of classical band-limited telephony perception metrics.  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.”

About TNOTNO is a prominent, independent knowledge company whose expertise and research contributes significantly to the competitiveness of businesses and organisations, to the economy and to the quality of life as a whole. Versatility and capacity to integrate this knowledge makes TNO unique. TNO employs some 4300 professionals. TNO operates in five core areas: TNO Quality of Life, TNO Defense, Security and Safety, TNO Science and Industry, TNO Built Environment and Geosciences and TNO Information and Communication Technology. The department of Information and Communication Technology was formed by the integration of the ICT research activities of KPN (The major Dutch Telecom operator) and TNO, combining 20 years of experience in perceptual modeling (e.g. ITU-T P.861 PSQM, ITU-R BS.1387 PEAQ, ITU-T P.862 PESQ) with 30 years of experience in speech intelligibility measurement (e.g. IEC 60268-16 STI).