HD Voice: The Color of Broadband?

Fran McGrath is CEO of ColorBroadband, a wireless broadband provider and VoIP carrier in Southern California. The company delivers voice over a redundant network, which includes a terrestrial and wireless network — owned and constructed by ColorBroadband. According to McGrath, the 3,000-square mile WiMAX (News - Alert) network is one of ColorBroadband’s primary differentiators, allowing them to deliver services as an ISP on a privately owned last mile. McGrath pointed out that this provides for “…an interesting redundancy element so that we have back up connectivity to our clients.”

 

McGrath told TMCnet that the WiMAX network is a failover for the voice services so its primary use is to transport data and secondarily it is used as a backup for voice.

 

Founded in 2002, ColorBroadband is a profitable, privately held concern, employing approximately 30 employees and serving customers that range from local businesses to large multinationals.

 

McGrath explained that typical customers run the gamut.

 

“We serve both small and large customers,” he said. “We have government clients, Fortune 100 clients, as well as the local machine shop and real estate office.

 

“We do have distributed clients that have offices throughout the U.S. and even some whose footprint is worldwide.”

 

As far as the technology is concerned, ColorBroadband offers their customers Voice over IP (VoIP) using a hosted PBX (News - Alert) platform, and, as McGrath told TMCnet, “we’ve standardized exclusively on Polycom for our endpoints. The SoundPoint IP 550 from Polycom is the most popular unit from Color Broadband Communications, and we have a steady stream of interest in all the HD Voice endpoints they bring to market.”  

 

McGrath continued, “We exclusively specify and standardize our offering on Polycom (News - Alert) voice products, and it kind of fits our market segment, which tends to be an enterprise or quality differentiated client. In addition, we have a joint marketing initiative with Polycom whereby we engage with them to promote their HD Voice technology.”

 

I asked McGrath to touch on the benefits afforded by Polycom HD Voice™ technology.

 

“It’s a dramatic improvement over analog or standard codec telephony,” he said. “I’m not a gizmo kind of person but I put one of these on my desk a few months ago, and I’ve become a cheerleader.”

 

McGrath explained the technology as well. “The human ear hears an auditory range of up 20 hertz to 20 kHz. Standard narrowband telephones cover about 300 hertz to 3.3 kHz between the highs and the lows.. HD Voice actually covers from 7 kHz up to the full 20 kHz — the entire range of our auditory capabilities is delivered — so when you’re on the call, the quality is dramatically different. It’s something that, when we show it to our prospects, there’s a ‘wow factor.’ This is, of course, why we do it.”

 

McGrath discussed some of ColorBroadband’s customers who are leveraging the HD Voice capability to do some rather interesting things.

 

“We have clients that do broadcast and export the voice payload over IP telephony. Essentially, somebody will sit in a studio remotely and call in, and you wouldn’t know they were remote,” he said.

 

“We have clients that do a significant amount of conference calling or just heavy phone usage, and it allows for them to accomplish more business on the calls because of the voice clarity,” McGrath added.

 

“The reality is — and it’s something Polycom actually touts — that users are generally more relaxed on the phone, more comfortable. The reality is you hear better, and it somewhat changes the paradigm of the phone call where I feel like I can conduct a conference call, as opposed to having to drive out or fly somewhere. It really seems like I’m right next to that person when we’re on the call. So we leverage this HD Voice technology internally, and we tend to promote that to our clients.”

 

As far as the future is concerned, ColorBroadband is bullish on Polycom’s HD Voice capable products.

 

“We’re only going to specify the HD Voice products henceforth,” McGrath said. “We tend to try to lead our clients into technologies that we feel are going to be sustainable and will help to future proof their business. We bring the latest technologies to our clients and integrate that into their communication offering.”