Distributed telephone conference with speech coders

Telecommunication device with conference capabilities where a speech signal is sent to other conference parties on a data transport channel, comprising:

• a conference means for building a sum signal of speech signals received from the other conference parties;
• a speech encoder to encode each party's own speech signal into a compressed speech signal, wherein the bandwidth of each compressed speech signal is at maximum, half of the bandwidth of the data transport channel;
• a data insertion means for inserting the compressed speech signal into a data stream, whereby the compressed speech signal is inserted into a single data transport channel useable to transmit a plurality of compressed speech signals;
• a data extraction means for extracting compressed speech signals from the received data stream;
• and
• at least two speech decoders to decode the extracted compressed speech signals into decompressed speech signals for processing in the conference means.

A telecommunication system for establishing a teleconference between a plurality of participants where every conference participant applies speech encoding to its own speech and transmits its own compressed speech signal via a single data transport channel to the other conference participants and wherein each participant receives the compressed speech signals associated with all other participants within said teleconference, said system comprising:

• means, for each conference participant, for extracting the compressed speech signals of the other participants from the data transport channel, wherein the bandwidth of such compressed speech signals associated with each participant is at maximum half of the bandwidth of the respective speech signal, and wherein at least one data transport channel is used for the transmission of two or more compressed speech signals;
• means, for each participant, for decoding the extracted compressed speech signals associated with each of said all other participants;
• and
• means, for each participant, for summing up all of said decoded signals to generate a sum signal.

A method for establishing a teleconference between a plurality of participants where each conference participant applies speech encoding to its own speech and transmits its own compressed speech signal via a single data transport channel to the other conference participants and wherein each participant receives the compressed speech signals associated with all other participants within said teleconference, said method comprising the steps of:

• extracting the compressed speech signals of the other participants from the data transport channel by each participant wherein the bandwidth of such compressed speech signals associated with each of said other participant is at maximum half of the bandwidth of the respective speech signal, and wherein at least one data transport channel is used for the transmission of two or more compressed speech signals;
• decoding the extracted compressed speech signals associated with each of said all other participants;
• and
• summing up all of said decoded signals to generate a sum signal.