An ITU standard for speech codecs that provides toll quality audio at 64 Kbps using either A-Law or mu-Law PCM methods. The G.711 format has been the standard for digitizing voice by the telephone companies starting in the 1960s. However, newer algorithms have lowered the bit rate considerably, and respectable quality can be obtained at 16 Kbps and well below that, depending on the quality of all the components in the system.