Mobile HD Voice Will Bring Wideband Audio to a Tipping Point

Wideband audio, a.k.a. HD voice, is gaining traction in the VoIP community, but the advent of mobile HD voice will tip the balance, both for HD voice and for VoIP.

In the past decade, VoIP technology has been widely deployed, but its impact on user communications has been surprisingly modest. Enterprise PBXs gradually are converting to VoIP, but the communications experience hasn’t changed. All of the major instant messaging platforms support voice chat, as do all major game consoles, but these are communications islands. For a consumer, mobile phones are the big story. What’s behind their success? Mobility is a clear benefit, and it works with all existing phones.

The VoIP community has a noticeable benefit to offer consumers – better, more natural calls. Cisco, Grandstream, Gigaset, Polycom (News - Alert), snom and others are shipping VoIP handsets that support wideband audio and provide significantly better call quality – so-called HD voice. But so far, adoption has been gradual, at best matching the gradual pace of business VoIP adoption. There are two problems standing in the way of faster uptake for this technology.

First, most enterprise IP telephony systems operate as islands of VoIP. They connect external calls via the PSTN, which immediately eliminates the extra quality of HD voice. Second, IT departments make the enterprise telecom purchase decisions. With budgets under pressure, who can justify “soft” benefits like markedly improved voice quality, even if the equipment cost is identical? After all, what about support costs?

But now, mobile operators in Europe have announced they’ll launch mobile HD voice services in 2010. Nokia (News - Alert) is already selling HD handsets, with other vendors expected to do so shortly. Mobile HD voice will boost the adoption of both HD voice and VoIP.

Mobile service takes the adoption decision out of the hands of the IT department and gives it to consumers – consumers who willingly purchase new and improved mobile devices (approximately every 24 months). As HD voice becomes available on mobile handsets it will find an eager public and, with wideband audio in high volume chipsets, incremental costs will plummet. Mobile service will allow HD voice to reach numerous early adopters, and then mass market acceptance.

Perhaps more important, mobile HD voice means new interfaces – VoIP interfaces – for the most important part of the PSTN, the mobile phone network. When Orange wants to interconnect mobile HD voice subscribers with France Telecom (News - Alert)’s triple play HD VoIP subscribers (an announced objective), they can’t use 64 kbps PSTN circuits. Mobile HD voice is an NGN service transported over IP in the core network. Mobile HD voice will lead to VoIP interfaces for the mainstream PSTN, i.e. the mobile network, and that will finally solve the islands problem that has held back the VoIP industry up until now. IT

Brough Turner (News - Alert) is chief strategy officer of Dialogic (www.dialogic.com)

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