Operators in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are now offering landline HD voice service, a development that has me both intrigued and annoyed.

Turkcell Superonline (News - Alert) started offering "HD speech" packages over its fiber-based voice network in November 2012. The carrier, like others in Europe, supports the DECT CAT-iq 2.0 wireless standard within the home. Customer equipment includes the Huawei HG253 fiber home gateway and Swissvoice IH250 handset. Fiber customers can get speeds up to 1 Gbps to the home.

Parent company Turkcell also offers cellular HD voice service using the 3G AMR-WB standard. CAT-iq 2.0 uses the G.722 codec. There are no details about how/if the company would support HD voice between cellular and landline domains, but someone has to be looking at the costs for dedicated transcoding.

Just last week, UAE carrier Etisalat (News - Alert) announced eLife and standalone landline subscribers would get free calls across the country and HD voice calling on its eLife triple-play fiber service. A lineup of HD voice phones will be released by July to support the new service. The carrier passes 1.3 million homes with fiber-to-the-home service and has almost an 80-percent penetration rate, according to company officials.

What intrigues me is the advance of landline HD voice service to the home beyond Europe. BT (News - Alert) and France Telecom have large deployments while Deutsche Telekom turned up its broadband HD voice offering in 2012. Fiber deployments in Turkey and the UAE shouldn't be that special in the large scheme of telecommunications services, but both carriers have delivering higher quality landline services to (presumably) complement cellular HD voice services within the country.

In the U.S., landline HD voice has been delivered either a business cloud service or available via an over-the-top offering, such as Ooma's plug-and-play device/network. Cable providers Cablevision and Comcast (News - Alert) have talked about offering HD voice service -- in Comcast's case, they've talked a lot -- but have never found the right combination of customer equipment and business model to move forward.

HD voice handset providers and equipment manufacturers seemed in a bit of a funk at the beginning of the year, looking for a way stimulate adoption of the service while not pouring a lot of money into promotions. Handset manufacturers should be especially excited about new markets opening up.

AT&T's DSL-based and Verizon's FioS service are both capable of supporting HD voice -- and already do with over-the-top users plugging in using soft clients, Ooma, and numerous third-party cloud solutions designed for remote office workers. But neither has shown the inclination to deliver something beyond narrowband.

I suspect both carriers will ultimately get around to offering HD voice for broadband landline services, given all the happy talk they're giving to HD voice when it arrives on their respective cellular networks when they turn up Voice over LTE (News - Alert) (VoLTE). But it's been a technology they could have delivered months and months ago without breaking a big sweat.