The HD Voice Buzz is Increasing Fast

Wideband voice delivers better voice quality than what we are used to from PSTN and cell phones. It has been around for a long time by now. The first real deployment was the G.722 codec in ISDN networks - mainly for audio conferencing. Because PSTN is inherently narrowband it took until VoIP started gaining interest until the promise of higher voice quality based on wideband voice could be realized. Microsoft, Skype, Google, Yahoo! and others started offering wideband in the first part of this decade. By now the majority of softphones and a growing number of hardware IP phones all support wideband voice.

There is some confusion in the industry around the terms wideband, super wideband, and HD Voice. It seems like HD Voice is gaining some momentum as a marketing term to describe both wideband and super wideband. From a technical viewpoint wideband is a signal that has been sampled at 16 kHz and can contain frequencies up to 8 kHz. Super wideband is associated with the 32 kHz sampling frequency and thus supports frequencies up to 16 kHz. Higher frequency content than 16 kHz is hardly relevant for voice (but for music).

In February, at the ITEXPO in Miami I participated in a panel on HD Voice. From the attendance and interest in asking questions it was clear that this is a topic of interest for a lot of people in the industry. A video of the session is available here. The question we were not able to fully answer was how to get the end users to demand HD Voice. I believe this will be a prominent discussion topic next month when Jeff Pulver gathers industry heavyweights for the HD Communications Summit in New York.

Daniel Berninger wrote a great piece as a guest blogger for the Jeff Pulver Blog about the importance of HD voice in the face of increasing adoption of text communication. He writes, "High Definition (HD) voice can do for the voice industry what it did for the video industry in triggering the replacement cycle that follows format changes."

In an effort to address the most common questions about HD voice, GIPS this week published a whitepaper on the topic. Make sure to check the GIPS in Action page to download the whitepaper, and to hear the difference between traditional speech and HD voice.

I will end with a shameless plug for our Light Reading webinar on May 5 entitled "The Potential of HD-Voice: What's All the Noise About?"

All this buzz makes me pretty sure that in a short period of time HD Voice will be the norm rather than the exception in terms of communication quality.