Mobile Wideband Voice: Farfetched or Around the Corner?

Everyone loves the convenience of a cell phone, but you won't find many people bragging about call quality.   However, higher-quality mobile phone calls are closer than a lot of people think and there are several paths too choose from.


If you want to be on the bleeding-edge of high-quality voice calls, you can put together a wideband communications kit today using a netbook, a headset with a microphone, a soft client such as Counterpoint's capable of supporting the G.722 codec, and a broadband data connection with a good uplink rate.

Of all of these pieces, a good broadband data connection is likely to be the most challenging in terms of consistency. Sure, there are the hotel WiFi (News - Alert) and Starbucks hotspots, but quality of service and guaranteed throughput upstream are hit-or-miss. If you believe in the virtual of a good quality phone call, EVDO Rev A data service is what you want since it has upstream rates of up to 1.8 Mbps under perfect conditions. In the real world, you'll get a couple hundred Kbps upstream, but since G.722 "only" needs 64 Kbps, this is more than sufficient. WiMAX may also be a good alternative if you have coverage in your area.

Needless to say, whatever works well under EVDO and WiMAX should work just as well – if not better – under LTE when Verizon and AT&T (News - Alert) start rolling out their respective high-speed services.

Down the road, you should expect to see soft clients supporting G.722 specifically written for smart phones such as the iPhone. Such clients will likely first check the available bandwidth before setting up a G.722 wideband call and many will likely offer an option of using alternative codec if the bandwidth isn't available.

Over in Europe, France Telecom (News - Alert) is already rolling out wideband voice codecs and services to its mobile users, with other carriers following suit. Portable handsets will support a variant of G.722 (G.722.2, to be precise) called AMR-WB (adaptive multi rate-wideband). Nokia (News - Alert) and Sony-Ericsson are shipping handsets supporting AMR-WB, with other manufacturers expected to follow.

It's anyone's guess as to when North American cellular carriers will start rolling out native support for wideband codecs in their handsets and across their networks with end-to-end quality of service like France Telecom. Verizon Business (News - Alert) – not Wireless, Business – has said its enterprise customers will start adopting high-quality voice in 2010 with general adoption expected in 2011, so the company as a whole may move towards fully embracing the wideband voice world around 2011 and beyond.