WYDE Follows Wideband Audio Launch With VoodooVox Partnership

David Erickson, CEO and founder of Free Conferencing Corp., launched a new startup this month called WYDE Voice, a conferencing appliance that supports 16-bit, 16kHz voice quality. Last week at VON.x in San Jose, Calif., the company unveiled its reseller program and announced a partnership with VoodooVox, the developers of In-Call Media.

Leveraging the Asterisk platform, the new WYDE Voice 16kHz wideband voice solution enables service providers and other enterprises to deliver a range of high-quality audio conferencing products. WYDE Voice can accommodate from 500 to 7000 concurrent G.711 callers, and up to 3,000 16 bit/16kHz iSAC callers.

“No one will buy bridges anymore that don’t have this kind of voice quality,” said Michael Eastman, vice president of sales at WYDE Voice.

Under the agreement with VoodooVox, WYDE Voice will integrate its platform with VoodooVox’s In-Call Network Exchange (ICNx), which enables service providers to offer free VoIP conferencing while simultaneously driving incremental revenue with ad-supported messages.

VoodooVox describes its ICNx as an international marketplace that brings together callers, advertisers, and call publishers to create an ad-supported telephony market, which it calls In-Call Media. In-Call Media is interactive audio that is dynamically served into call streams. Callers can opt in to more robust experiences while on hold, when interacting with an IVR (interactive voice response), or with numerous other routine calling situations.

“We are strong believers in their wideband product because it will make the difference that moves people from the PSTN to voice-over-IP. [Previously] there was no difference in quality, but now, voice quality is the differentiator,” said Gene Cohen, chief technology officer at VoodooVox.

At a fraction of the cost of traditional conference bridges, Marc Beattie, partner and CSP Practice Manager at Wainhouse Research, LLC, said this new product has the potential to really disrupt and push the industry towards adopting newer technologies. The advent of wideband audio will have widespread appeal and fill a real need in the market. And from a pure cost-per-port perspective, the WYDE Voice product could really shake things up, he said.

In addition to high-quality voice, WYDE Voice products include: instantaneous active speaker update, real-time conference control via session initiation protocol (SIP), Web services application interfaces for integrating third-party applications, preconfigured call-flows, authenticated conferences and recording and playback.

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