Many times I am asked, how do we compare with Skype? My response is: we are not competitors. We are a product company. Here at CounterPath, we develop products that help our service provider customers compete with Skype. Primarily this is through our leading Bria endpoint product line available across multiple device categories: PCs, mobile devices and tablets. We also develop very specific and customized versions of our Bria softphones to meet the needs of our direct customers while creating a unique user experience for their customers (a.k.a., end users).
So why would CounterPath add Skype’s SILK codec to our Bria mobile products? Simple – the performance of the codec. What function does the codec perform? Simply put, the codec encodes and decodes the audio within the endpoint. It captures our analog voice and turns it into digital bits that are moved over the Internet to another endpoint or PSTN gateway (voice gateway). On the other end of the call the exact opposite happens (digital to analog). Some codecs perform better than others. More importantly, some are free and others are royalty bearing. The SILK codec is free and also performs very well compared to other similar codecs that are royalty bearing. I should point out that because Bria supports SILK does not mean Bria can interoperate with the Skype service directly. Of course Bria users can call Skype users via the PSTN.
Adding SILK to Bria increases our codec support and gives our customers a wider choice for their go-to-market plans.
November 8, 2011
Mobile VoIP, Softphones, VoIP