Voxbone Announcement Signals Coming HD Voice Wave
Today Voxbone announced that their iNum international calling service will support HD voice. The company claims to have integrated the G.722 codec in its infrastructure, with plans to add more codecs in the future.
I think this news is very promising, but it raises some questions about the maturity of the market for HD solutions. On one hand, getting buy-in from a service provider to support HD voice is a great sign for the health of the technology and the VoIP market. For one, it validates the importance of HD and indicates that people really do care about voice quality. It also signals that Voxbone is fairly optimistic about the proliferation of the technology since it will need to support a variety of endpoints, and is assuming that a significant portion of these are or will be HD enabled.
It is this last point that I am the most curious about. From what I could gleam from their website, iNum is a Google Voice-like service that allows users to carry one phone number with them, anywhere in the world on any device. The company has partnerships with a variety of VoIP service providers like Gizmo, Google Talk and Truphone that offer HD-enabled endpoint technology, and offers an access number service for PSTN users.
For any call to be in HD, both sides of the call need to have HD-enabled devices or applications. So, if a user’s iNum number rings a landline or mobile phone that is not running a VoIP application, it will be a narrowband call, since the last leg will be PSTN. The only way it can be in HD is if both sides are running a VoIP application, like Gizmo, or are subscribers of a Vonage-like service that uses HD voice and has HD codecs implemented on the users’ phones. The first scenario seems somewhat unlikely, as a peer-to-peer call between VoIP clients would be a lot simpler. The second, however, doesn’t seem to be that prevalent at the moment, Orange’s recent announcement aside. It takes time for service providers to implement transcoding technology at the termination points and to roll out HD enabled hardware at the customer premise. The only thing I can think is that Voxbone anticipates rapid growth in the demand for HD voice services in the coming months, and that they are trying to stay ahead of the curve. If they are right, it would mean nothing less than a total redefinition of voice service.
