Full Rate

Full Rate (FR or GSM-FR or GSM 06.10 or sometimes simply GSM) was the first digital speech coding standard used in the GSM digital mobile phone system. The bit rate of the codec is 13 kbit/s, or 1.625 bits/audio sample (often padded out to 33 bytes/20 ms or 13.2 kbit/s). The quality of the coded speech is quite poor by modern standards, but at the time of development (early 1990s) it was a good compromise between computational complexity and quality, requiring only on the order of a million additions and multiplications per second. The codec is still widely used in networks around the world. Gradually FR will be replaced by Enhanced Full Rate (EFR) and Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) standards, which provide much higher speech quality with lower bit rate.

Technology

GSM-FR is specified in ETSI 06.10 (ETS 300 961) and is based on RPE-LTP (Regular Pulse Excitation - Long Term Prediction) speech coding paradigm. Like many other speech codecs, linear prediction is used in the synthesis filter. However, unlike most modern speech codecs, the order of the linear prediction is only 8. In modern narrowband speech codecs the order is usually 10 and in wideband speech codecs the order is usually 16.