#I♥HDvoice and there are multiple reasons. Jeff Pulver provides a very good summary here in this video – so I won’t repeat what is already a good message.

However, I will add this – all of us in the industry need to work at raising the profile of HD voice – so that all telephone users understand what is HD voice. The fact that we can’t always understand each other on the telephone is one glaring reason. So today, GIPS is reaching out to spread the word on HD voice and you can help too.

Let’s reach out to twitterers, colleagues, competitors, facebook friends IM buddies and compile a list of Mondegreens and spoonerisms.

What’s a Mondegreen or spoonerism I hear you say? A mondegreen is a phrase that is misheard or a misinterpretation of a phrase. A spoonerism is an error in speech or deliberate play on words in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched.  We’ve all heard them. Rude, fun, bizarre – they run the gamut.

I plan to compile the best Mondegreens and spoonerisms and weave them into a blog topic that we can share around to promote the need for HD voice.

It’s an easy way to reach out to twitterers (I suppose that’s a word now) and bloggers and it would be great to see if we can raise the profile of HD voice through Twitter and get people talking about the need for huge improvements in our telecommunication with the technology that exists today.

So no matter how inane, it would be great if you could contribute, retweet #I♥HDvoice with a phrase – and what it was supposed to say.

To submit your tweet to GIPS on twitter click here.

Canned weed Buick – Yeah swing  gang!

As pointed out in John’s blog, the HD Communication Summit last week was a great gathering of industry experts, all with the same goal of advancing HD voice deployments. At times the discussions were fairly but always very constructive.

The hottest issue related to the number of wideband codecs that need to be supported. Some suggested that in order for HD Voice to really take off a very limited (two to three) set of codecs has to be agreed upon. Clearly there are scenarios where interoperability is no issue and hence any codec can be used in such scenarios. Others said that it is unrealistic to assume that such a small set of codecs will be agreed upon and that transcoding will be a necessity. AudioCodes, for example, suggested that this is the most likely scenario. Dave Frankel, CEO of ZipDX also suggested that we need to accept transcoding, at least initially, to get HD Voice going. If not, we run the risk of not getting anywhere by waiting for the codec “war” to come to an end. Currently, it seems like G.722 is the most common choice for interoperability. As Jason Fischl with Skype pointed out, not only is the bitrate high but G.722 is also extremely sensitive to packet loss and therefore not a good choice for VoIP anywhere outside the managed networks.

Another discussion related to codec choices that created some debate was the topic of licensing. The codec landscape contains everything from open source, through license free proprietary codecs to standards with very complex licensing situations. For many, I believe, this was the first time they realized that even a codec that is labeled free is rarely truly free. Many free licensing agreements include marketing and IPR conditions that will be, by some, considered as having a high cost. In addition, indemnification from IPR claims does not come for free.

Most people I talked with agreed that the fastest way to create an end user pull for HD Voice is by widespread deployments in the wireless networks. It was very interesting to hear Benoit de Boursetty, Director FTNA, at Orange describe Orange’s deployments of HD Voice. Clearly this is an operator that takes HD Voice seriously and sees it as a key differentiator. Benoit said that they don’t see a distinct pull for HD Voice but on the other hand he claimed that it does increase customer retention.

The message in my own presentation was that the codec is just one piece of the HD Voice puzzle. I.e., in order to experience true HD Voice, all other parts, including acoustic hardware, echo cancellation, and other signal processing have to support HD Voice and provide the best possible quality. It doesn’t matter how good of a codec you have if the other parts of your solution are not up to par. I was glad to see that several other of the speakers at the event, including Martyn Humphries of Broadcom and Christian Stredicke of Snom, made the same observation. Christian also suggested a HD Voice label to be put on HD Voice capable devices.

For more details about the summit, check out the twitter feed here.

Jeff Pulver announced that the next event will be held on September 15 – 16 this fall.

Some additional blogs on this event:

http://pulverblog.pulver.com/archives/008925.html

http://dougonipcomm.wordpress.com/2009/05/21/hd-communications-summit-pulver-announces-hd-marketing-association-fcc-petition-fall-event/

http://dougonipcomm.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/hd-communications-summit-codec-convergence-hd-logo-take-center-stage/

http://blog.radvision.com/voipsurvivor/2009/05/20/can-you-hear-me-now-2/

http://www.mgraves.org/voip/2009/05/hdvoice-summit/