How to Implement HD-Voice Successfully is the subject of our Telephony Online Webinar on Wednesday October 28. Personally I would have liked to use the above title, as it’s very true.

“T’ain’t What You Do It’s the Way That You Do It,” is an old jazz song most famously sang by Ella Fitzgerald in 1939 – about the same time the last improvement was made to voice/sound quality on the telephone.  Never a more true term was said when it comes to HD voice – it’s the way that you do it.

Personally I think HD voice will become de rigueur eventually   – Why would you want to have bad quality when your competitors will offer better solutions? – but trying to cobble a solution together without decades of speech and signal processing expertise is likely to cause a company severe headaches, time delays and frustration not to mention money. So hopefully some of you will be able to join our webinar to learn more about:

• What is actually required for HD voice?
• How do you deal with all the inherent issues of IP networks that constantly effect call quality?
• How do you choose an HD voice codec?
• Case study in HD voice deployment

As a bonus CommuniGate Systems will also join our webinar to discuss their Unified Communications solution, which offers HD voice, for enterprises and carriers.

In-Stat’s analyst Keith Nissen predicts that the HD voice market is expected to grow to more than $3 billion a year. I’d also add that it offers a first-class communication experience with greater intelligibility, comfort and experience without the audio fatigue that conference and telephone calls suffer from currently.

It’s Friday, so I’ll leave you with this version of the song (click image below) from 80’s bands Fun Boy Three and Bananarama because remember: It Ain’t What You Do It’s The Way That You Do It!

Telecommunications is a vast industry but one thing our company can claim with 100 percent certainty is that GIPS is synonymous with HD voice. It’s not just because the company has developed the wideband codecs, which are an integral part of providing HD voice, it’s because our whole company lives, breathes and sleeps media processing- whether it’s HD voice or HD video.

When a company licenses GIPS technology, they get the entire remedy, not just the codec, to deal with the IP gremlins that live out in the network. The result is an HD voice call… something the codec alone cannot guarantee.

Those gremlins – network congestion (getting on a London Tube at rush hour every few seconds would be easier), packet loss (just think of trying to find your luggage with no identity tags, no specific baggage claim area at Heathrow during an airport strike ), echo (Yodeling through the grand canyon to communicate with your friend at the other end ) and jitter are just a few of the network issues that must be overcome to provide HD voice.

We’ve had a number of requests from customers that want to identify their product with HD Voice. So we put together a logo that should make it clear to everyone that they are using HD voice.

We hope you like it.

Over the last few weeks there has been a lot of activity on the HD Voice front. I have myself participated in not less than three HD voice events since the beginning of the month. It started with the ITEXPO conference in L.A. in the beginning of September. A whole track was dedicated to HD Voice with several interesting panels. The room was full most of the time indicating a growing interest in this topic. I think people have started getting the benefits of HD Voice because now the discussion was much more focused on how it can get deployed quickly rather than what it is. In particular, the notion that just because you have a HD codec you don’t necessarily offer true HD Voice quality garnered a lot of interest. This was also the focus of my talk at the HD Communications Summit in New York a couple of weeks after ITEXPO. The codec is of course a crucial part of any VoIP solution and it sets the upper limit of the quality that can be achieved. So, a good HD Voice codec is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for offering HD Voice quality. Many other parts of the solution are equally important in order to achieve the best quality. The most important factors to consider are:

• HD capable microphone
  • At least 16 kHz sampling frequency
• HD Voice Quality Enhancement
  • Echo cancellation, noise suppression, gain control,…
• High quality HD Voice codec
  • Suitable for usage scenario
• End-to-end network HD Voice support
  • Preferably no transcoding
• Network clean-up
  • Quickly adapting jitter buffer and smooth packet loss concealment
• HD capable loudspeaker
• Low latency

Only if all these factors are properly addressed will the users experience true HD Voice. My colleague John Hermansen found a very good way of illustrating this message with this picture:

An HD solution with just a codec is like a clunker with really nice rims...

The most recent event covering HD Voice was The VON CTO Summit which was organized by VON in conjunction with the VON conference in Miami this week. The event was advertised as ”…a high-level dinner roundtable at which leading competitive service providers will develop a road map for creating a nationwide IP-based peering fabric that will bypass the legacy PSTN and support advanced services such as HD voice.” The results from this meeting will be announced in the near future.

#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!

Not much has changed in the last 60 years of telephone, yes “we went from analogue to digital but not much else,” said Jeff Pulver at the opening of the GIPS’ sponsored HD summit in New York. The summit was an intimate gathering of 70+ people passionate about building recognition and further demand for HD voice – and importantly people with the ability to make that change possible.

It’s true, that all of us tolerate poor voice quality on phones and one can get better voice quality from two tin cans and a wire – a sad indictment of the telecommunication industry. “How many time do you have to spell your name phonetically over the phone?,” posed Pulver to the audience – most said yes. “Now how many people have to do that in person…”

Currently, the technology exists to support HD voice, though the hardware support needs to catch up. The challenges to provide HD Voice has been overcome by a number of companies including GIPS, it’s the tipping point that we need to reach and as mobile and fixed broadband deployment increases, so will HD voice.

Jeffrey Rodman, CTO and co-founder of Polycom stated “HD voice is even more important” than HD video. While, some will disagree, I think it’s a correct assumption. HD Voice is critical for public safety, emergency services and business. As Rodman illustrated in his presentation trying to decipher communication over the phone should not be an issue – it could save time and lives if we used HD voice.

“The outside of the phone has changed over the years but the inside of the phone has remained the same since 1937,” said Rodman in his presentation. (Actually it has got worse when you consider the introduction of mobile phones) but his point is a sad indictment of the industry. While other industries have progressed the telephone remains the same.

So what will it take to make HD voice ubiquitous in the US? The short answer – It will take a multi-pronged approach.

The FCC will need to be lobbied (they’ll also have to listen) and educated on the benefits of HD voice. Public safety, emergency services and business are just a few of the major reasons.

The general public needs to be educated and that is the responsibility of many of the companies that attended today’s conference. Better comprehension, identify who is talking on a conference call, higher productivity, lower fatigue and overcoming different accents are just some of the benefits of HD voice.

Telecommunication carriers will need to understand the benefit and see that a move to HD voice could put billions of dollars on their market cap. It could also provide a huge differentiator for the first-mover.

Our everyday lives would also be positively impacted by such a transition to HD voice.  Pulver brought up a good point – if the phone was to be invented and introduced for the first time today it would be an invention that would be ridiculed for its quality especially when you compare it to other devices available today. People expect high-definition. They expect it from their video games, DVDs and computers.

Today is just the beginning of the bigger push for HD voice – and co-opetition will be required to push it forward from all the industry’s players.

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.