News/Latest Updates

The new POLQA v3 forms a major upgrade to the established industry standard for benchmarking voice quality in mobile networks and ensures POLQA is “5G ready”. Edition 3 of P.863 is a significant step forward and brings a lot of improvements and extensions while maintaining full backward compatibility. Edition 3 was consented by Working Party 2 of ITU-T Study Group 12 on 15 Feb. 2018 and is now undergoing AAP process. This approval period typically lasts for four weeks, and is scheduled to end 12 March 2018. Commercial implementations will be available from OPTICOM thereafter.

Connect and P3 established network benchmark test in Germany almost 15 years ago, but since then have introduced tests in Austria, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Australia and soon Singapore...

read more

Erlangen, Germany, 29. November 2016

German "Connect" magazine again awarded the best mobile networks in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. For the 5th year in series, OPTICOM GmbH's POLQA voice quality software is setting the standards, now also including VoLTE evaluations.

Mobilfunk-Netztest 2017: Wer hat das beste Handy-Netz? - connect.de
Wer hat das beste Handynetz in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz ...

read more

In an elaborative project, under the leadership of OPTICOM, the partners to the POLQA Coalition have advanced POLQA by developing a new version V2.4 –introduced as “POLQA 2015” – which was adopted by ITU SG12 in September 2014. POLQA V2.4 will supersede POLQA V1.1 as Edition 2. The updated POLQA OEM library from OPTICOM is available since September 2014.

For more information about the advancements, please download the whitepaper, highlighting the differences between V1 and V2.

Download

Geneva, Switzerland, 21. March 2013

Invited by the ITU, OPTICOM’s CTO Chris Schmidmer and CSO Joachim Pomy represented the POLQA Coalition during a recent New Showcasing event at the Study Group meeting in March 2013. According to Mr. Hiroshi Ota of the ITU-T, this new forum is intended to highlight achievements of successful implementations of ITU Recommendations developed within SG12, such as POLQA. Following a successful Mobile World Congress 2013 earlier on in February, OPTICOM was able to report a steep adoption of the new mobile voice quality testing standard by many leading T&M vendors, operators and ICT industry members (see also our Reference List).

Solothurn, Switzerland, 29. June 2012

'The acquisition of SwissQual by Rohde & Schwarz is a positive statement of confidence in SwissQual’s efforts and leadership in many areas of testing, including our contributions to the POLQA standards and the POLQA coalition. There is no intention of changing any of the approach, involvement, partnerships or efforts that have been so successful up to this point in bringing POLQA to fruition. Customers can be assured of our continued, and unchanging, efforts in this critical area of our business. As in the past, POLQA/P.863 licensing will be handled by OPTICOM, and existing license agreements will continue unchanged.'

John May, CEO
SwissQual AG

On 28. June 2012 Rohde & Schwarz had announced to acquire and integrate SwissQual into the Rohde & Schwarz group of companies. See the press release for further information.

Erlangen, Germany, 13. February 2012

In November 2011, ITU-T Study Group 12 released two new implementer’s guides for Recommendation P.863 (POLQA).

Implementer’s Guide 1 defines an enhanced method to derive a MOS value from the raw POLQA output. This so-called “mapping function” was already implemented in all previous commercial POLQA implementations offered under license by OPTICOM. Therefore, this new guide requires no action for OPTICOM’s customers.

The second Implementer’s Guide deals with a collection of bugs found by the POLQA Coalition in the ITU-T example code, as well as with one enhancement of POLQA for signals which exhibit severe time scaling artifacts. All these findings were addressed in OPTICOM’s POLQA OEM Library version 1.6. Since some of the changes do have a small impact on the results, POLQA users are highly advised to update their software accordingly. The update is free for all licensed OPTICOM customers.

Erlangen, Germany, 28. October 2011

The parties to the POLQA Coalition have finalized arrangements for a joint P.863 patent pool with OPTICOM as the sole licensing agent. OPTICOM, acting as a one-stop source for the POLQA technology on behalf of the POLQA Coalition, is now offering commercial license agreements for POLQA/P.863. OPTICOM provides professional one-stop IPR licensing along with advanced POLQA OEM software tools for Windows, Linux and Android for a quick time-to-market integration.

As an independent OEM technology vendor with plenty of experience in technology licensing, OPTICOM also acts as a firewall between competitive vendors and members of the POLQA coalition. All license agreements will be based on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions according to the ITU-T IPR policy. SwissQual, TNO and KPN have agreed to take a passive role and will not actively engage in POLQA licensing.

It is to be expected that shortly leading Test & Measurement manufacturers will have adopted POLQA/P.863 in their products covering a wide scope of applications from lab tools, over production testing, network design and optimization to benchmarking and monitoring. In order to find out which is the proper tool set for your application, you may look up the reference list of licensed companies, organizations and POLQA product vendors on www.polqa.info.

Erlangen, Germany – Solothurn, Switzerland – Delft, The Netherlands, 14. July 2010

OPTICOM, SwissQual and TNO win ITU Competition and announce POLQA, the Next-Generation Mobile Voice Quality Testing Standard