The long-promoted EVRC-NW codec is starting to roll into CDMA handsets today, with the first carrier launch of HD voice on a CDMA network expected to occur this year, says Qualcomm (News - Alert). Long-time watchers of wideband should appreciate the advance since Qualcomm has been actively plugging HD voice for CDMA carriers since at least early 2009.

“We have [EVRC-NW] in every CDMA chip that is sampling,” Qualcomm senior director of product management Peter Carlson stated. “ It's in anything new going forward and is an integral part of the portfolio.”

Carlson would not discuss specifics as to when exactly EVRC-NW became a standardized feature that carriers could opt to turn on, but it will be incorporated into everything – “high end to low-end” – that ships in the future. The capability is already shipping in some phones, with the feature turned on by a handset OEM when a carrier decides to launch the service; support also has to be provided by the carrier within the network.

In addition, carriers might have the capability to use EVRC-NW for HD voice service, but may choose not to, instead leveraging the features of it and other 1x Advanced 3G technologies to free up more bandwidth for data services.   Carriers are pressed to provide more RF spectrum for data – yes, thank you Apple (News - Alert) iPhone and Siri – with 1x allowing carriers to increase voice capacity by a factor of four in the same amount of spectrum.   Put another way, carriers can take existing voice spectrum and cram calls into a fourth of the space, freeing up the rest for EV-DO data usage.

There's also the 3G/LTE (News - Alert) play.   As carriers turn up LTE networks, 3G networks aren't going anywhere. The older network remains to provide voice while Voice over LTE (VoLTE) gets sorted out. Since LTE networks are being rollout on various timetables, customers want a phone that provides voice and data regardless of what city or anticipated rollout date is for a new network. A dual-mode chipset provides backwards compatibility with existing networks and a reliable voice path until the carrier can provide a solid LTE and VoLTE implementation.

“In emerging markets, carriers are more concerned about 1X capacity enhancements,” Carlson stated, with carriers “seeding markets all over the world” with phones containing 1x Advanced/EVRC-NW chipsets. Infrastructure interoperability testing has already taken place and devices are shipping to “several carriers and different regions.”

Lighting up HD voice will be dependent upon the need for RF bandwidth and the expected penetration of handsets to provide sufficient mass for customers to be able to make wideband calls; it doesn't make sense to announce HD voice if you don't have enough customers capable of taking advantage of it.

Transcoding between HD voice codecs seems to be an open question at this point. Qualcomm believes in transcoder-free operation, proliferating the number of codecs and avoiding transcoding whenever possible. 

When will announcements come? Carlson wouldn't be pinned down. I suspect we may get some more clues out of Mobile World Congress (News - Alert) (MWC) next month and at CTIA in May.

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