HD Voice: Pleasing the Customer While Bolstering the Bottom Line

By Jim Machi

Much has been written in the last few years about HD Voice (aka wideband audio) and its benefits. And it’s no wonder. HD Voice is gaining significant momentum around the globe as mobile users continue to adopt new technologies, replacing their mobile devices an average of once every two years. Demand is growing and availability across service providers’ networks is quickly developing as well. 

Recently, Doug Mohney, editor at HDVoice News, wrote a report about the significant momentum behind HD Voice, using the term “snowballing" as it gains momentum. And although the U.S. isn’t exactly “snowballing," it does show strong potential, with providers like Verizon and Comcast likely leading the pack.

So how can both service providers and consumers benefit from HD Voice? Let’s first take a quick look back at the evolution of voice telephony to see where we are today.

Why HD Voice? Why Now?

Telephone callers have suffered unnecessarily for many years with severely constrained sound quality. Outmoded standards based on 1930s microphone technology and 1960s digital circuit technology have remained in wide use, even though wideband audio standards have been available since the 1990s (G.722 and AMR-WB or G.722.1).  But why?

For decades, people were happy to just make a phone call, since they could only make them from home, from the office, or from a pay phone. Convenience was so limited that quality wasn’t really a concern.

Then the mobile revolution began – calling became fun and could be done from anywhere, anytime as service providers realized how much they could profit by improving their network coverage. The only glitch was that voice quality on mobile phones was even worse than on landlines – giving service providers an excellent competitive reason to improve voice quality.

Video and Conferencing Further Spur Change

Today, some exciting research (along with a few new realities) is also spurring change:

• Blogs were buzzing last year when Skype’s CTO, Jonathan Rosenberg, announced a new study showing that HD Voice calls last almost 50 percent longer than conventional G.729 calls. Needless to say, 50 percent longer calls can mean 50 percent more revenue for a service provider’s voice business – mobile or fixed.
• Orange/France Telecom has been working hard at bringing HD Voice to its customers. Its motivation? Company surveys revealed that 50 percent of its customers said they would actually switch providers to get better sound quality, when mobility and price are equal. Surveys by others report even higher numbers (65 percent), making HD Voice an important competitive advantage.
• In the early 1990s, the video telephony industry made a startling discovery – user perceptions of video calls could be improved by sacrificing video bits to provide wideband audio, or HD Voice! As video conferencing becomes ubiquitous and video on smartphones grows in importance, Quality of Experience (at the lowest possible cost) has taken on increased importance for service providers, as has HD Voice.

The Bottom Line

The benefits are clear.  Both service providers and consumers can profit tremendously from HD Voice services. And as consumers become more demanding of voice quality, service providers are ready to enable HD Voice with gateways and media server software that allows developers to gain an advantage in the HD Voice revolution. Not only do these services improve customer loyalty by providing strong voice quality that today’s consumers demand – they provide a value-added service, with the potential to significantly increase revenue for service providers.

So what does the future of HD Voice hold? Is it the future of mobile phone calls? I certainly think so.

Jim Machi is senior vice president of Marketing for Dialogic Corporation , responsible for developing marketing strategy and driving marketing communications. He is also responsible for long-term product planning and strategy for all Dialogic products. Machi has been with the company since 1998.