iBasis, Chunghwa Strike IPX Accord

BURLINGTON, Mass. -- iBasis, a KPN company, and Chunghwa Telecom Co. Ltd. (TAIEX: 2412, NYSE: CHT), the leading telecom carrier in Taiwan, today announced an agreement to create a multiservice IPX Peering connection to provide high-quality IP-based services for end-users.

HD voice will be the first IPX-based service Chunghwa will launch. The HD voice over IPX service delivers true high-fidelity voice through advanced coding technologies and mechanisms that reduce background noise and transmit a wider range of frequency. End-users experience dramatically improved sound quality, which facilitates longer and more productive international calls. To resolve the interoperability challenges that hinder network-to-network HD voice service, both companies cooperate to provide all necessary transcoding between wideband codecs as well as between wideband and narrowband codecs.

“We are very pleased to be working with Chunghwa Telecom to make the dramatic quality improvement of HD voice a reality for end-users’ international mobile calls,” said Willem Offerhaus, CEO of iBasis. “Together, we are delivering on the promise of IPX to enable innovations that are of high value to operators and their subscribers.” “In line with the launch of Taiwan’s LTE in 2014, we have scheduled to have our voice, data and mobile roaming traffic migrated to the IPX network and to provide IP traffic transit for carriers in Taiwan. By interconnection with a leading IPX provider such as iBasis, we hope to act as an IPX base in Taiwan extending IPX service to Asia and furthermore worldwide. We are happy to cooperate with iBasis for HD voice over this IPX peering connection to provide our customers with high quality voice service,” said T.F. Leng, President of CHT International Business Group.

In addition to HD voice, Chunghwa Telecom and iBasis will cooperate to offer a variety of services over IPX, including GRX, SMS, LTE Signaling and Roaming and Voice over LTE (VoLTE).

iBasis Inc.