Both Digium (News - Alert) and Dialogic have rolled out new products over the past two weeks that boast impressive HD voice credentials. And it's a good thing too, because Europe is flooded with mobile HD voice with the U.S. starting to get mobile HD next year with the rollout of Voice over LTE (VoLTE).

Digium released Asterisk (News - Alert) 10 at AstriCon in Denver last week. The new release's "most important new feature" is a wideband media engine, according to the company. Asterisk's "telephony-grade" media engine has been swapped out for one that now supports what is dubbed "studio-quality" audio and a nearly unlimited codecs.

The best way to contrast "telephony grade" with "studio quality" is to look at the sampling rates. Old Asterisk previously worked with 8 and 16 kHz sampled audio. Asterisk 10 supports sampling at 8, 12, 16, 24, 32, 44.1, 48, 96 and 192 kHz rates -- so you're waaay past CD quality and into the esoterically complex audiophile world of DVD Audio and Dolby Surround Sound. (Of course, your phone is lucky to handle the higher parts of the lower end, but that's a different story for a different day.)

New codecs supported with Asterisk 10 include Skype's/Microsoft's SILK, 32 kHz Speex, and pass-through support for CELT. About the only bummer here is no AMR-WB, but that's due to a licensing issue. VoiceAge (News - Alert) and Digium should cut a deal because AMR-WB is only going to continue to gain popularity.

But there's more HD voice in Digium's new conference bridge. The old MeetMe bridge has been replaced with an HD-capable "intelligent" bridge application called ConfBridge. The new bridge supports all codecs and conference rates, with intelligent mixing algorithms to provide each participant with the optimal audio quality for their connection. In addition, ConfBridge will support some videoconferencing, relaying video of a designated/current speaker to other participants in the conference, assuming everyone is using the same video codec on their SIP device.

Out this week, Dialogic's latest release of PowerMedia HMP 5.0 is billed as being the first solution in the PowerMedia HMP (Host Media Processing) family to incorporate a distributed architecture -- just the thing for HD voice and video cloud-based solutions running on Linux and Windows platforms. HMP 5.0 scales up to 5,000 simultaneous SIP connections or 1,500 voice sessions, and provides support for HD voice and video play/record, conferencing, multimedia streaming, transcoding, and IVR solutions.

Timing for both products is excellent. Deutsche Telekom alone has rolled out mobile HD voice service to four countries in four months and France Telecom (News - Alert) continues to spread HD voice across its subsidiaries in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Verizon Wireless is scheduled to roll out VoLTE in "sometime" 2012, but that sometime is likely to be sooner in the year since both AT&T and Sprint (News - Alert) have announced VoLTE rollouts in 2013. AMR-WB is the de facto codec for VoLTE-- and it's HD voice.