The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) have carried out development and standardisation of a wideband speech codec for GSM and the third generation mobile communication WCDMA system since 1999. The Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband (AMR-WB) codec algorithm was selected in December 2000, and the corresponding specifications were approved in March 2001. The AMR-WB codec was jointly developed by Nokia and VoiceAge. AMR-WB extends the audio bandwidth from 3.4 kHz to 7 kHz and gives superior speech quality and voice naturalness compared to existing 2nd and 3rd generation mobile communication systems. The wideband speech service provided by the AMR-WB codec will give mobile communication speech quality that even exceeds (narrowband) wireline quality.