Strange, isn’t it, that the first casualty of the explosion of mobile phones seemed to be... voice quality. You’d think that voice quality, if anything, would have been improved from the old landlines. Everything else was an improvement, why not voice quality?The stunning improvements in cell phones, from simply portable phones to a device containing everything NASA needs to launch a Mars probe while Twittering about it, “highlights one area where the phones have remained pretty much awful,” CNN Money noted.

There are a couple reasons for that, and optimism that a renewed focus on voice quality is in the offing in the form of HD voice. Which itself may be obsolete even before rollout as a mass market feature.First, WIND Mobile CEO Anthony Lacavera told The Globe And Mail, “voice has been the lonely stepchild over the past few years as data growth has exploded.” In the rush to get more and better data squeezed out to mobile devices, the actual phone call part of the phone was almost brushed aside, included as an afterthought, or a throw-in, because what you were really after was texting, right?Customers noticed. “It has reached the point that I don’t want to talk to certain people on the phone because the voice quality is so bad... the audio equivalent of trying to read a letter written in ink after it’s been soaking in water for several hours,” wrote Marc Levy of Cambridge Day last year. We see those heads nodding.

It doesn’t really matter what device you use, either. Hard-core iPhone (News - Alert) fanboys complain about voice quality -- check out the “Why Is My IPhone 4 Call Quality So Bad? discussion, as do Skype (News - Alert) devotees, as a quick glance at the community boards attests. Why is it so hard to get right?In a word, codecs. This is the software math that compresses your voice to travel to its destination through cyberspace. To save space -- it’s crowded out there -- they only send what The Globe And Mail calls “a small slice” of voice, using the 200-3400KHz range. But now there’s HD voice, which uses frequencies ranging from 50-7000KHz. You can hear the difference already. Obviously there’s a tradeoff between quality and economics, as there is with pretty much everything else in the world.  

The nice thing about the new codec is that carriers don’t need new cell towers or base stations to carry it. But you do need an upgraded, HD capable handset to use it. There could be software upgrades for existing phones that solve the problem too, but usually HD only applies in certain areas, forget about roaming in HD, or even calling outside of certain designated zones. And you might just be keeping the phone warm for VoLTE anyway. That’s Voice over LTE service, and Verizon (News - Alert) is testing the waters for a possible 2013 rollout, The Globe And Mail noted, adding that the fact that VoLTE is “entirely IP-based” means it can be a bit cheaper than HD voice, but it too requires a significant infrastructure upgrade to be a mass-market item.