Currently, Orange offers mobile HD voice service in 10 countries around the world: Moldova, Armenia, Belgium, France (mainland France and Reunion), Spain (Catalonia), the UK, Egypt (Cairo), Luxembourg, Mauritius and Romania.

This month it plans to add the Dominican Republic and Uganda.

Yes, Uganda joins India in having better mobile voice quality than the first-world United States of America. Maybe the Federal Communications Commission and Congress could ask AT&T when it plans to introduce HD voice service here in this backwater country – especially since the carrier already has the wireless infrastructure in place to support it, according to the vendors who supply its network gear.

Later this year, Switzerland and three to-be-named countries in the AMEA (Africa, Middle East and Asia) region will turn up mobile HD voice, making a total of 16 countries that FT has turned up. Users can choose from about 20 mobile handsets, with more on the way.

Orange has re-stated its commitment to launched “fixed” HD voice service in Spain and Poland in 2011, and has added Tunisia to the list. To date, Orange serves around 800,000 fixed mobile HD voice customers.

(Quick side bet here: One of the AMEA countries which should get mobile HD voice is Tunisia. But I said that last year and it didn’t come true, so who knows.)

The big stick enabling more fixed HD voice deployment is CAT-iq 2.0. France Telecom will be rolling out the Samsung SMTW3510 , a cordless IP phone using the DECT (News - Alert) 6.0 standard and the G.722 codec.

Interoperability is the big pole in the tent for HD voice. Orange says in the 2012-2013 timeframe, it will have HD voice interoperability – specifically, seamless calling – between Orange countries as well as between the fixed and mobile networks in a given country. This is a big deal since Orange will have to transcode between the AMR-WB codec on mobile networks and G.722 on the fixed networks, so someone (Dialogic (News - Alert)?) will be selling some more boxes.

In 2013, Orange expects to have interoperability between “the various operators” based on “common standard” such as CAT-iq 2.0 or AMR-WB for mobile HD voice – a VERY big deal, since a number of mobile operators in Europe starting to roll out AMR-WB, including SFR, Telekom Austria, Telecom Italia (News - Alert) and most likely T-Mobile sometime real soon. Since Orange and Deutsche Telekom (DT) already share one network in the UK and plan to share RF networks across Europe, DT is going to have to roll out HD voice support.

I suppose this is where I put out the obligatory plug for the HD Voice report I published with TMC (News - Alert) in April. You can find more details at http://www.tmcnet.com/voip/ip-communications/.

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