Uganda has become the 22nd country in the world to offer users "high-definition" quality on mobile phones. So you might wonder why U.S. service providers have been slow to adopt.  Read more here.

The reasons are not as hard to understand as some might think.

Introducing any significant new feature on any network requires surmounting the "chicken and egg" problem. Think back to the adoption of fax machines or email addresses, for example. To the extent that a network effect exists for all communications services, the new innovation has greater value as each additional user is added. The immediate problem is that, at the beginning, the network has to be enabled for the new service, then a user has to buy a new device, and then all the other users one wishes to converse with must do the same.

For fax machines and for email addresses, there was some inflection point reached where there were enough other users or machines to make adoption worthwhile. But there was a long period when adoption was quite measured, because there simply were not enough other people or devices to communicate with. Beyond that, network scale also is an issue. 

It might be one thing to conduct such a roll-out in a confined market, or a small market. It is quite another thing to make a major change in a large market, or all relevant markets. Executives at France Telecom (News - Alert), for example, have been working quite hard to get interoperability for HD voice across networks. The problem is that even when France Telecom enables HD voice for its own customers, those features become useless if the other people called on other networks cannot use the HD feature.

On the network and business front, there also is an issue of timing. Some would note that full HD voice will work best on new fourth generation mobile networks. And those networks still are being built, and users are only now starting to buy 4G service. But the network effect holds there as well. There still aren't that many mobile subscribers, for example, on the 4G networks, to say nothing of the number of fixed line accounts that are HD-enabled. 

At some point it will make sense to enable HD voice. But right now it might not make much financial sense, as most consumers will not be able to use the feature on most phone calls. Nor is the business case so clear. Will consumers pay more to use HD voice? If they won't, does it make sense to spend money enabling it?

Granted, service providers would love to see users consume more voice, if they can maintain or increase voice revenues. The argument is that people will talk more when they have HD voice. But that remains an unproven thesis. At some important strategic level, executives are going to question whether it makes sense to invest more in voice services at a time when virtually everyone believes voice revenue will continue to dwindle. 

One might make the argument that HD voice can slow the rate of descent, but it obviously will be offset by capital investment and operating cost investments (marketing, if nothing else). Some executives might make the argument that it makes more sense to invest scarce capital elsewhere.

Also, there is a historic argument. For whatever reason, U.S. consumers often have  been late adopters for mobile services. That was true for use of mobiles as well as use of text messaging. When users discovered value, they adopted quickly. That is likely to be the issue for HD voice.

But the issue is complicated for other reasons. It is not clear that service providers will be the primary beneficiaries. Over the top providers might be able to introduce HD voice with an easier path to solving the adoption problem. Perhaps HD voice works best for conferencing between Facebook members, Google users, Apple (News - Alert) users or some other logical pre-existing community. 

If so, HD voice might not be the revenue generator some believe it is. One might argue that HD voice reduces churn, or creates marketing differentiation. That might be the case. Carriers, though, have made choices in the past for mature services that suggest "not investing" makes sense. AT&T (News - Alert) simply harvested its declining cash flow as long as possible. 

Some telcos have decided to allow customer attrition rather than substituting lower-priced VoIP services for legacy voice. Sure, telcos are guaranteed to lose customer share. But up to some point, it still makes financial sense to protect the higher gross revenue, higher margin legacy voice services rather than drop prices across the board.

For all those reasons, some might argue that HD voice is in a supplier push mode rather than an end user pull mode. Given all the other considerations, executives might wait quite some time before making big bets on HD voice.