OPTICOM First to Report Mobile Benchmark Ranking Based on New 'POLQA' Test Method at Mobile World Congress

ERLANGEN, Germany, February 11, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

- Press kit materials are available online at: http://www.virtualpressoffice.com/public/kit/OpticomMWC2011

MWC Barcelona Hall 1 B 39 -- At this year's Mobile World Congress, OPTICOM premieres a range of OEM products implementing POLQA, a new voice quality test method just adopted as International Standard ITU-T P.863 in January 2011. The global provider for voice and video testing technology will also present results of the very first field evaluation which employed the new standard technique to benchmark real life mobile-to-mobile call quality, throughout Germany, including the four major mobile operators. The data was originally gathered for a Quality-of-Experience benchmark published by the popular 'connect' magazine, which elects Germany's best mobile network operator once a year. Together with P3 Communications, the engineering service provider behind the tests, OPTICOM investigated the application of POLQA/P.863 and unveils the first observations.

POLQA represents the next-generation of voice quality testing technology for fixed, mobile and IP-based networks and can be applied to HD Voice, 3G and 4G/LTE. POLQA will be the successor for PESQ/P.862, which has evolved as the most successful industry standard for voice testing with more than 20,000 licensed test systems used in mobile networks around the globe.

OPTICOM's CTO and standards developer Dipl.-Ing. Christian Schmidmer says: "One of the most motivating experiences is hearing experts in the field already recognising POLQA as a major step forward for optimizing next-gen mobile communications. POLQA performs up to 56% better than PESQ, opens new application areas and eliminates weak points, encountered with other methods."

During the development of the new POLQA standard, more than 100,000 fixed, mobile and VoIP test calls were gathered by experts from all over the world, thus representing the largest and most accurate database ever used in the development of a perceptual quality algorithm. The POLQA perceptual measurement algorithm is a joint development of OPTICOM, SwissQual and TNO, made available as licensed software for various platforms.

Also available at this year's MWC premiere, OPTICOM offers its POLQA Q-App in a mobile form factor for Android Smartphones. The Q-App implementation of POLQA runs as fast as real-time on commercially available Smartphones and complements OPTICOM's PESQ/P.862 Q-App for Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile.

Right from the start, OPTICOM offers mobile manufacturers, T&M vendors and operators tailored OEM license programs for standard setting POLQA reference implementations.

About OPTICOM

OPTICOM GmbH is the leading vendor for Voice, Audio and Video quality measurement technology and OEM products for the analysis of Mobile and IP-based networks. Since its foundation as a spin-off from Fraunhofer's MP3 development team, the pioneers in perceptual quality testing have continuously been providing International world-class standards for audiovisual quality evaluation, including PESQ, PEAQ and PEVQ, and now also source POLQA.

For 15 years, the Perceptual Quality Experts from Germany have been striving to evangelize a growing community of soft- and hardware developers, network operators and quality assurance people, how to properly assess digital networks, carrying Voice, high-quality Audio and Video.

OPTICOM's proven OEM technology can be found in most state-of-the-art products, including the Who's Who of the Test &Measurement and Telecom's industry.

http://www.opticom.de