Octastic Blessed by BT Exact

MONTREAL -- Octasic Inc., a fabless semiconductor vendor delivering innovative silicon solutions for the telecommunications infrastructure market, today announced that its echo canceller chip has completed a comprehensive test program at BT Exact, BT's research, technology and IT operations business. Octasic's OCT6100 Series of Echo Cancellation and Voice Quality Enhancement devices successfully completed all of BT Exact's expert assessment tests, with 98.6% of the tests resulting in the highest rating possible. The tests were selected based on BT Exact's extensive experience of delivering carrier-grade networks and services to determine the product's ability to meet the expectations of network operators and service providers.

Independent subjective assessment by BT Exact is an important step for vendors looking to have their technology deployed by service providers. Successful completion of these tests demonstrates the 'carrier grade' credentials of the product and confirms that networks using the OCT6100 Series of echo cancellation devices will allow service providers to offer superior voice quality to their customers as they migrate to next generation networks.

"We're pleased that these independent test results validate our efforts to develop a revolutionary algorithm that sets the standard for superior quality and performance in echo cancellation and voice quality solutions," said Frederic Bourget, Senior Product Manager, Octasic Inc. "BT Exact is recognized worldwide as a pioneer in communications technology research and innovation, and our product's successful completion of their test program represents an important milestone for Octasic and its customers."

Bob Reeves from BT Exact who is a leading world expert on echo control and rapporteur in the ITU-T SG15 stated: "Octasic have developed an echo canceller that maintains its audio transparency under the rigorous network conditions that BT Exact uses as part of its comprehensive assessment procedures. Based on our expert assessment, the performance of Octasic's echo canceller is comfortably above the acceptability threshold for inclusion in carrier class networks."

The expert assessment tests were conducted by a team of specialists from BT Exact with extensive knowledge in degradations introduced by echo cancellers. In a variety of conversation scenarios these specialists evaluated performance in single-talk and double-talk steady state and convergence periods. The scenarios covered multiple aspects of calls such as delays, Echo Return Loss (ERL) and a variety of background noises at different levels. Additional behaviors of the OCT6100, such as avoidance of temporal clipping or background noise modulation, were also evaluated. The results of the tests showed that no adverse effects were introduced by the echo canceller.

Octasic Inc.

BT Exact Technologies