With over 13,000 people on payroll worldwide, 80 research units and a 1.3 billion euro annual research budget, Fraunhofer IIS (News - Alert) is a non-profit research monolith, examining fields as diverse as molecular biotechnology to non-destructive testing and sustainable energy systems. The organization's portfolio includes one of the gold standards of music in the information age -- the MP3 codec -- and its IIS Audio and Multimedia division co-developed AAC (Advanced Audio Coding).

You'd think with those impressive credentials, the organization and its technology would be on the short list of any discussion on HD voice -- but it's not. Fraunhofer IIS's organization as a German non-profit hinders what the company can in terms of directly promoting its products. Due to what I understand to be regulatory rules because the German federal and state governments provide about a quarter to a third of Fraunhofer's annual research budget, the organization can't do advertising.

Yup, the fathers of MP3 can't buy print ads or web ads or beat on the drum too loudly to promote the goodness of its technologies, unlike others in the space such as Global IP Solutions (News - Alert) (soon to be Google IP Solutions) and Skype. And that's too bad because there's a lot of interesting technology that's been developed.

The open-source route is also a non-starter, since the organization has to generate up to two-thirds of its own revenue per year in order to pay the bills for those 13,000 employees. Yes, it would be cool if various bits/codecs/code of the Fraunhofer portfolio were open sourced, but there's already a heady stream of revenues rolling in from the Apple (News - Alert) iFamily (iPhone, iPod, iPad), Nintendo, Sony, and various other phone manufacturers, plus MPEG-4 devices, digital radio devices, and mobile TV standards; manufacturers and developers of AAC codecs need to purchase a patent license.

In the HD voice universe, I think AAC and the related Fraunhofer code will become more relevant in the next two to three years. Currently, service providers are wrestling with implementing baseline SIP interoperability and supporting G.722 for the broadband and enterprise worlds with AMR-WB the codec of choice this minute for mobile service providers in Europe.

Once all the underlying SIP interoperability issues are (finally) worked out on an all-IP infrastructure, rolling in new codecs should be a relatively straightforward task. AAC is already being 'baked' into Android, iThings, Sony and Nokia (News - Alert) phones for music playback so it isn't too difficult to envision a world down the road where AAC has a shot to be the gold standard for audio for both live conversation and music playback.