The Bulgarian telecommunications operator Max announced that it has rolled out HD voice and video over its network.
The company says it’s the first carrier in the country to offer 4G LTE (News - Alert) connectivity features to its mobile customers.
“We are now at a turning point in the development of voice services. Voice over LTE (VoLTE) is to voice products what high definition video was to standard TV services,” Max CEO Peter Covell said. “It is crystal clear and you think that the person you are speaking to is in the same room.”
HD Voice uses the greater bandwidth offered by 4G to improve the audio quality over voice calls, attempting to give a more natural sound as opposed to the standard “telephony” sound that people have become accustomed to, an artifact of using copper wire to make phone calls.
Infonetics (News - Alert) research has predicted that the number of mobile subscribers with access to LTE and HD voice to reach over 50 million over 38 networks by the end of 2015, up from only eight networks worldwide in 2014.
If more customers will have access to HD voice, it’s not clear that if they’ll take advantage of HD service. More people seem to prefer typing over talking on their phones. Texting remains popular, but the rise of apps like Facebook (News - Alert) and the Facebook-owned WhatsApp represent a serious threat to the revenue streams of carriers.
HD voice is also currently available only on high-end handsets like the iPhone (News - Alert) 6. While it will trickle down to cheaper handsets in the future, it’s not obvious if consumers will see HD voice as a compelling upgrade over standard voice service and continue to put up with bad voice connections while opting for over-the-top services like Skype (News - Alert).
HD voice will likely remain a premium service for some time until enough customers upgrade to handsets that support it and carriers update their infrastructure.
Edited by Alisen Downey