Skype Gives Away HD VoIP Codec

There is no question in my mind that HD voice is the future of communications. The PSTN and associated codecs, microphones and speakers are all designed to transmit telephony based on technology a half-century old. Few other industries have such legacy standards. Today’s smartphones have the power of a supercomputer from the nineties in them yet they transmit voice of inferior quality based on state of the art voice compression technology our grandparents invented. Kind of stupid wouldn’t you say?

At ITEXPO last month we had a well-attended luncheon panel (video) focusing on HD Voice and although the current economy is no friend to most new technologies, I believe over time we will see it embraced more widely.

The speakers on this panel were Alan Percy (AudioCodes), Tim Yankey (Polycom), Debbie Greenstreet (Texas Instruments), Bill Bumbernick (Alteva) and James Awad (Octasic).

Skype must agree that the future of voice is HD because they recently rolled out their SILK super wideband high compression codec royalty-free. This news won’t change the market overnight but it is a strong step in the right direction and hardware manufacturers and service providers should take note of the transition from legacy voice to HD.

  • Debbie
    March 4, 2009 at 9:54 am

    And Jan Linden, from GIPS was on the panel as well…

  • Rich Tehrani
    March 4, 2009 at 7:14 pm

    Thanks Debbie,
    I knew there was one other person on the panel. I cut and pasted from an older blog — before he was named. Sorry Jan as well.
    Sorry I missed you this week BTW Debbie. Rich

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