Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IISBuilt-in satellite connectivity will soon become a standard feature of phones, cars and other connected devices, leveraging GEO, LEO and multi-orbit constellations to ensure global coverage. The primary drivers for its adoption are emergency response and voice services.
Mobile and satellite network operators, device manufacturers, and regulatory bodies are keen to make universal coverage a worldwide standard by efficiently integrating terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks (NTN).
While current speech codecs work well for terrestrial 4G/5G voice services, they typically require 13 kbit/s or more to achieve good audio quality – a fact which makes them ill-suited or impractical for large-scale applications such as NTN. Fraunhofer has applied innovative AI-based technology to a new generation of voice codecs, Fraunhofer NESC, which reduces the required bitrates to some 1 kbit/s or less.
