There are many things in our daily lives that we come to accept and have given up questioning as to why we tolerate it. From shoddy call centre service from credit card companies (“please press 1”, “please press # to listen to all your options again”, “sorry I didn’t understand that command, please call back goodbye”), short-changed at the below-average lunch place, (yes I still go!), no phone signal in the centre of the City to the daily bus driver who waits to see me running before he takes off for the next stop.

However, it looks like there’s a chance I can get my voice back when I read about Orange announcing it will be the first to offer mobile High Definition (HD) Voice for its customers in the UK – well a trial anyway with full nationwide roll-out due later in 2010

HD Voice offers sound quality that my concert-damaged ears can understand. As a company with offices across the globe and people I have to talk with people across different continents with varying accents, which can often be difficult to understand over the telephone. I accepted it for too long but now that issue is resolved when I’m able to use Nimbuzz, Yahoo or CommuniGate to speak with HD Voice clarity. However, often I’m stuck talking on a mobile with terrible-I’ve always put up with this – sound quality.

News that Orange is stepping ahead with HD Voice should send shudders down their competitor’s spines. There’s very little to differentiate one mobile service to another – they might tell us there is but really? However, HD voice on a mobile telephone that’s a huge differentiator for a device that is designed principally to talk.

As the baby boom generation go gently into retirement and their hearing deteriorates the offer of HD voice will be attractive. As too, will all the younger generation who have endured countless noise exploding concerts, nightclubs and iPod blasting music…HD voice must be and will be heard.

I’m a firm believer that HD Voice will herald a new era for mobile communications and a new standard for the telecoms industry – however, it’s that domino effect  that companies such as Nimbuzz, Yahoo, Google, Skype and CommuniGate that herald change – let’s hope there are some other mobile carriers that will brave an HD world.

So if you want your voice heard come and meet with GIPS next month in Paris at the upcoming HD summit and hear the difference.

GIPS is a company that never sits around. It’s a company that is constantly innovating, developing and leading the market. That’s why the Company announced the availability of VoiceEngine Mobile for Android today. GIPS VoiceEngine allows Android application developers to build solid performing HD voice (VoIP) enabled applications quickly, expertly without reinventing the wheel.

The first company to offer HD voice on Android-based mobile phones is Nimbuzz, the social mobile application company. Nimbuzz is rapidly gaining interest with over one million people signing up to use their service each month and with the addition of Nimbuzz on Android phones – it is only set to grow even faster.

It was only last week that Nimbuzz launched their new offering NimbuzzOut, which allows calls from the Nimbuzz application to any mobile or landline phone at affordable prices whether it’s 3G or Wi-Fi. As GIPS CTO, Roar Hagen said: “Nimbuzz continues to offer their users a distinctive unified social messaging application that connects popular social and instant messenger networks into one simple, user-friendly offering.”

In an earlier post I mentioned that Gartner has predicted that Android will become the second most popular smartphone by 2012 with 14.5 percent market share and iPhone with 13.7 percent market share. Now all I have to decide is whether to leave my iPhone for the new Droid!

Last week, Cory Andrews wrote a blog post wondering when HD voice will be available on mobile devices. Michael Graves followed up yesterday with his own post on the topic. While I think they are both right to point out where the industry is falling short, a reader may be under the false impression that mobile HD voice solutions do not currently exist.

Andrews and Graves both bring up excellent points about the lack of HD support for mobile phones. In addition to hardware limitations on the devices themselves, mobile carriers are incredibly hesitant to deploy VoIP, and thus HD, services.  Andrews sums up the dilemma when he says, “With 3G here and 4G coming, the bandwidth is certainly there to support HD calling on mobile devices. Seems all that is currently lacking is a traditional carrier or mobile VoIP provider and a handset manufacturer with a wireless device that supports G.722 or alternative wideband codecs.”

While I agree 100 percent that the ultimate goal should be for the major carriers to offer HD mobile services for any user capable of accessing next-gen networks, there are third party applications that already offer HD capabilities for mobile users. One such service is offered by GIPS customer Nimbuzz. While it does require the user to download a separate application, Nimbuzz delivers incredibly high quality voice to a user over WiFi and 3G. In addition, it offers the benefits of social networking, IM and contact list consolidation.

For more information on mobile HD voice, check out the webinar GIPS and Nimbuzz produced a couple weeks ago.

Earlier this week, Global IP Solutions held a webinar providing details on the market potential of HD Voice, the technical challenges and when users can expect the prevalence of HD Voice. GIPS was joined by Nimbuzz’s Tobias Kemper who talked about HD Voice on the mobile platform. Most Nimbuzz users can already experience HD-Voice on their mobile devices – even though they can’t experience it during a regular cellular call. Progress is being made!

Already, Nimbuzz is available on over 1,000 types of mobile devices and is registering over 600,000 new users each month – so an incredible amount of people can hear the difference between regular mobile call quality and the GIPS HD experience.

However, the HD Voice experience is possible not just because of wideband codecs but also because of the technology that solves the intrinsic imperfections of IP networks such as echo, delay and jitter.

While wideband codecs (the basic component of HD Voice) were developed many, many years ago – and great improvements have been made over the years, development has mostly hailed from one area – Stockholm. The city of Stockholm is truly the global center of audio processing technology for packet networks. With strong university foundations in sound and image processing, plus many of the brightest engineering minds and the handful of companies in this field the city has fostered innovation.  So if you’ve ever wondered why Global IP Solutions was found in Stockholm, now you know.

While people can experience HDTV – and the image is greatly improved, I personally think the improvements in HD Voice are far more dramatic. Imagine your cell phone calls being clear without having to ask the other person: “sorry I didn’t catch what you said.” Meanwhile, feel free to check out the archive of the Light Reading webinar presentation on HD Voice given earlier this week.

While GIPS will be finishing up its video demonstrations at VoiceCON, there should be some interesting news from CTIA.  Zer01, a solely mobile VoIP provider here in the US is set to launch its beta phase. As some of you may have already seen, Zer01 is starting to cause a stir with its all you can eat voice and data buffet – and there’s no more suitable place to launch an all you can eat plan than Las Vegas!

The website claims, “Bring us your tired, your weary, your sick of contracts and fees. Zer01 brings you unlimited calling, truly unlimited data with no contracts and no fees,” all for $70. I’m tempted to move over from my current provider, AT&T, as my locked plan will expire this summer but I’ll have to wait and see if Zer01 will support the iPhone in the future. Currently Zer01 offer a number of phones but it appears that only windows mobile phones are being supported initially.

A few of the services that look very appealing to me are the following:

• Low International Rates – $10 per month unlimited to certain countries
• Call Record – Record any of your conversations and have the recording delivered to your phone as voicemail.
• Softphone Access – Softphone access via your desktop or laptop as a telephone.
• Anonymous Call Authentication – Avoid automated anonymous calls by making anonymous callers enter a series of numbers to complete their call to you.

According to a recent article in InformationWeek, the company will interconnect or use roaming agreements with wireless carriers to tunnel to Zer01’s own IP backbone.

So if you’re current cellular contract is about to expire (and you have a windows mobile phone) this could be a great option to reduce your cell phone bills and experience VoIP at its best.

You can vote until this coming Monday for your favourites at CTIA, some personal recommendations that I will be voting for are here – both Nimbuzz and Zer01. Just click ‘Mark as favorite’ to register your vote.

Meanwhile, if you are attending VoiceCON next week, please stop by GIPS’ booth #501 and say hello.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Nimbuzz and other mobile VoIP applications is the possibility for communications that the iPhone opens up (a topic which Kevin Tofel hints at in his review of iPhone VoIP services). Nielsen recently reported that there are over 3 and a half million iPhone subscribers, making it one of the most popular devices on the market. By combining the user-friendliness and advanced media support of the iPhone, with a high quality, feature-rich application, companies like Nimbuzz are pushing the envelope of what can be offered for mobile communications.  There are obviously still a number of hurdles that need to be overcome, such as carriers’ unwillingness to support VoIP calls on their networks, the somewhat closed development environment of some mobile devices, and the inherent technical challenges of developing mobile VoIP applications. However, as devices like the iPhone continue to open up and support more advanced features, the promise of mobile VoIP and video becomes more apparent.

The Nimbuzz iPhone App