G.729a

G.729 is an audio data compression algorithm for voice that compresses digital voice in packets of 10 milliseconds duration. It is officially described as Coding of speech at 8 kbit/s using code-excited linear prediction speech coding (CS-ACELP).

Because of its low bandwidth requirements, G.729 is mostly used in (VoIP) applications where bandwidth must be conserved, such as conference calls. Standard G.729 operates at a bit rate of 8 kbit/s, but there are extensions, which provide rates of 6.4 kbit/s (Annex D, F, H, I, C+) and 11.8 kbit/s (Annex E, G, H, I, C+) for worse and better speech quality, respectively.

G.729 has been extended with various features, commonly designated as G.729a and G.729b. The differences between these versions are noteworthy because they each have additional properties and thus different use-cases:

Dual-tone multi-frequency signaling (DTMF), fax transmissions, and high-quality audio cannot be transported reliably with this codec. DTMF requires the use of the RTP Payload for DTMF Digits, Telephony Tones, and Telephony Signals as specified in RFC 2833.

G.729a is a compatible extension of G.729, but requires less computational power. This lower complexity, however, bears the cost of marginally reduced speech quality.

G.729a was developed by a consortium of organizations: France Telecom, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT)

The features of G.729a are:

Some VoIP phones incorrectly use the description "G729a/8000" in (e.g. this affects some Cisco and Linksys phones). This is incorrect as G729a is an alternative method of encoding the audio, but still generates data decodable by either G729 or G729a - i.e. there is no difference in terms of codec negotiation. Since the SDP RFC allows static payload types to be overridden by the textual rtpmap description this can cause problems calling from these phones to endpoints adherring to the RFC unless the codec is renamed in their settings since they will not recognise 'G729a' as 'G729' without a specific workaround in place for the bug.

G.729 has been extended in Annex B (G.729b) which provides a silence compression method that enables a voice activity detection (VAD) module. It is used to detect voice activity in the signal. It also includes a discontinuous transmission (DTX) module which decides on updating the background noise parameters for non speech (noisy frames). It uses 2-byte Silence Insertion Descriptor (SID) frames transmitted to initiate comfort noise generation (CNG). If transmission is stopped, and the link goes quiet because of no speech, the receiving side might assume that the link has been cut. By inserting comfort noise, analog hiss is simulated digitally during silence to assure the receiver that the link is active and operational.

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