| HD Voice – A Killer App |
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Your phone service sucks, unless you are one of the handful using the new high bit rate codecs. Jeff Pulver and Dan Berninger – the VON *** HD voice could change everything. Jeff Pulver and Dan Berninger the VON team are doing the HD Communications Summit in New York on May 21. Any large voice carrier not looking at this is putting their future at risk. Code "DAVEB" gets you 20% off http://www.amiando.com/hdcomm.html (ad) See you there, or at Jeff's June 16 event The 140 Characters Conference. Tweet tweet The better codecs are why Skype calls over half a dozen hops on the public Internet often (but not always) sound better than regular calls across town. The problem, of course, is that both ends of the conversation need to be on the same system. That keeps most independents out of the game, but makes it natural for an incumbent with a large local base. If Cablevision did Long Island, they'd have better voice than Verizon. Someone like that will soon show the way, and I predict remarkable results. From Dan's “The HD Connect Manifesto”There exists no difference between the end user experience of a telephone call in 1959 and 2009. The wireless industry made telephone calls mobile. The VoIP industry made telephone calls cheap. Yet, every penny of voice revenue requires the sale of a 1950 quality telephone call. Reversing the declining fortunes of voice requires the industry to finally get around to improving voice quality. High Definition (HD) voice can do for the voice industry what it did for the video industry in triggering the replacement cycle that follows format changes. Faith in the status quo remains a significant obstacle in spite of the fact AM radio offers better audio quality than telephones and telephones do not support over half the frequencies associated with human voice.
Voice can convey information that goes well beyond the words spoken to the extent there exist sufficient quality. The cues reflecting emotional state necessary for establishing intimacy get lost with traditional telephone calls. The precision of language disappears along with the high frequencies necessary to convey consonant sounds and low frequencies associate with vowel sounds (hence reliance on A as in alpha type codes.) Communication with non-native speakers becomes nearly impossible without adequate voice quality. The obstacles to achieving higher levels of voice quality in 1950 no longer exist. A number of recent standards (e.g. 3GPP, 4G, Packet Cable, CAT-iq) incorporate HD options. The current generation of chips available from Broadcom, Texas Instruments, and Infineon all incorporate HD capability. Polycom, Siemens Gigaset, Snom, and Audiocodes offer HD capable IP phones. Achieving a critical mass of HD devices will take time, but the network effect issue can get addressed as they did in the case of fax and email. HD audio quality, click-to-connect, and unmetered global termination or collectively - HD Connect - can serve as the basis for a resurgent voice industry. I think Dan's underestimating what a large broadband carrier could do with this, especially since it's part of the cable standards. |
team – are doing the HD Communications Summit in New York on May 21. Think CD player vs. old transistor radio. I've been a true believer since I heard demos from GIPS at VON years ago. The difference is startling. Any cableco who switches over will have a huge advantage over telcos, enough to totally change the battle for customers. Some telcos in Europe are switching over, with Thomson promoting the technology heavily.
