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.

It’s not my title, but the heading for a new report from In-Stat. I disagree with the title –I’m an optimist – I think it will transform the mobile space as there are just too many advantages to mobile VoIP.  While it states that Mobile VoIP “still poses a direct threat to operator voice revenue, it also represents a dynamic new capability that promises numerous applications.” Yes that’s true and carriers recognize that their voice revenues are declining regardless. However, on the flip side they are of course noticing that their data revenues are exploding.

A few findings from the report are as follows:

• Activities associated with early Mobile VoIP successes are likely to influence LTE operator voice plans in ways that potentially favor IMS.
• While the EMEA region has more Mobile VoIP related revenue currently, Asia Pacific will be the largest regional market by 2013.
• Dual-mode handsets will approach nearly 400 Million units shipped in 2013.
• Revenue and users associated with Mobile VoIP will be distributed among online Mobile VoIP services, 3G-Based Mobile VoIP offerings, and WiMAX/LTE Mobile VoIP offerings.

Earlier this month I wrote a guest article for VentureBeat that talks more on the subject of mobile VoIP – it might give you another perspective.

On a related note, earlier this week, GIPS sponsored the second HD summit in New York. Two of our executives – Jan Linden and Joyce Kim – spoke at the conference. There is a momentum growing within the industry to push HD voice but also an increasing market recognition that HD voice is coming. Orange in Moldova will be deploying HD voice for mobile – good news for the industry as a whole.

After my last post, in which I mentioned that G.722 is not well suited for usage over unmanaged networks such as the Internet, I received a few comments on that topic and therefore thought it would be helpful to elaborate further in this posting.

Let me start with trying to straighten out a question mark related to G.722. What is really G.722?  When we talk about G.722, do we talk about one codec or the set of codecs that seemingly belong to the same group since they all have names that start with G.722? This set of codecs include, in addition to G.722 itself, G.722.1, G.722.1 Annex C, and G.722.2, which are all very different codecs (one could possibly argue that G.722.1 and G.722.C are not so different since basically G.722.1C is a super wideband version of G.722.1). Since they are distinctly different codecs it is customary to treat them separately and not use the G.722 name for the group of codecs but only for the actual G.722 codec itself. With this cleared out we can focus on the characteristics of G.722.

G.722 was standardized by the ITU-T in 1988 and is a wideband (7 kHz audio bandwidth) speech codec operating at 48, 56 and 64 kb/s. The technology it is based on is called sub-band ADPCM. ADPCM coding is recursive which results in a strong dependency on previously received data when decoding at the current time instant. This obviously has a negative impact on performance when frames of data are lost. Without the proper history of data 100 % correct decoding is not possible and some kind of guesswork has to be included.

Even though G.722 is an old standard it is still being considered for new deployments, such as the New generation DECT (DECT-NG) standard. The main factors making it an attractive choice are that it is a wideband codec with low complexity and no IPR issues. It supports three rates, 48, 56, and 64 kb/s which facilitates some limited adaptation to available bandwidth. However, on the negative side you have to consider that the quality for the bit rate is not very high, and the robustness against packet loss is not the best.

In fact, until recently there was no packet loss concealment (PLC) technique defined for G.722. Implementing PLC was left completely to the device or application manufacturer.  The result is that the PLC and, and therefore G.722 performance, varies significantly between implementations.  Recently, The ITU added Appendix III and IV to the G.722 standard which specifies two PLC algorithms that can be used with G.722. Appendix III delivers better quality but at the price of significantly increased decoder complexity while the complexity increase when using Appendix IV is negligible. Both are significantly better than typical implementations I have seen previously. However, both algorithms are based on IPR that most likely require a license from the patent holders to be used.

For more details, please read this study of several ITU wideband codecs. The following figure, taken from the France Telecom presentation compares the performance of G.722, G.722.2, and G.729.1:

The conclusion is pretty clear. In clean (no packet loss, no background noise) conditions G.722 at 64 kb/s has noticeably lower quality than G.729.1 and G.722.2 at 24 kb/s. It should be noted that the quality of G.722 at 56 kb/s and 48 kb/s drops significantly over the 64 kb/s mode.

Consider the following figure from the same study for comparison of PLC  methods for G.722:

PLC A is Appendix III, PLC C is Appendix IV, and PLC 0 is a brute force method that just sets all missing codewords in the decoder to what corresponds to the minimum value, which give a lower limit on what a PLC method for G.722 can do. If the packet loss concealment methods proposed in the new Appendices to G.722 are used, decent quality can be achieved up to about 5 % packet loss, however less sophisticated methods cannot even handle 1 % of packet loss properly.

In summary, the pros of G.722 are that it is IPR free (PLC not included) and the relatively low complexity. On the negative side you find a high bandwidth utilization, lower quality than other options even at significantly higher bit-rate, and inconsistent packet loss robustness. As has previously been stated, it is clear that the codec in itself is just a small piece of the puzzle and that it is the implementation, more than anything else, that determines the quality.

Links to a few codec comparisons:

http://www.cablelabs.com/specifications/PKT-SP-CODEC-MEDIA-I07-090702.pdf

http://portal.etsi.org/stq/workshop2007presentations/Quinquis_slides.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_codecs

Hot off the tales of the HD summit last week in New York, I was bemused to see a BBC reporter sitting in the very seat I occupied in Central Park last week using the free Wi-Fi connection. While I could still use googletalk there (and overcome the VoIP challenges of a poor Wi-Fi connection) her report from Central Park was interesting because she might have as well been in rural Northern England and got a better connection.

BBC’s Michelle Fleury report was part of a larger article on broadband speeds available in member countries of the OECD. Fleury reported on how the US’s free market leaves it with slower web access than other countries. As well documented Japan, South Korea and the Northern European countries lead the world in broadband access, while the US saunters behind countries such as New Zealand, Czech Republic and Austria.

While the US broadband has been driven by free-market development, it is generally more expensive and slower than most other OECD countries.  Now that $7 billion in US tax-payers funds has been earmarked for broadband development  – the FCC will be responsible for rolling out faster and hopefully cheaper broadband.

Broadband networks are fundamental for economic and social development in every country. These networks serve as communication and transaction platforms, which are as crucial as other infrastructures such as roads, rails and airways.

At the HD summit, the mobile operator and Internet service provider, Orange (France Telecom) pointed out that they provide superior broadband speeds for 30 Euro per month – tax included. An equivalent broadband speed here in the US (50Mbps) costs between $90- $150 per month.

While this BBC report is dismaying, I’m an optimist and believe broadband speeds will increase in the US and with it the push for HD voice.

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/

Last week’s webinar on HD Voice talked about the fundamental requirements to provide high definition voice over IP (VoIP): wideband codecs and the technology to overcome delay, jitter, echo and packet loss, which are intrinsic problems with IP networks. While the codec is a crucial element of HD voice, alone, it is not the panacea for solving IP network challenges.

GIPS gathered some interesting statistics on people’s experience (or lack of experience) with HD voice from the webinar that I would like to share.

A great feature of a survey is the ability to dispel, confirm or surprise you. 186 people responded to the webinar survey and I was surprised at the percentage of people who have not experienced HD Voice – over 60 percent of the professionals who participated. Only 11 percent use it whenever possible. My personal opinion is that once people come into contact with HD voice, they will wonder why they tolerated such bad telephone call quality in the first place.

90 percent of people thought that the benefit of HD voice in conference calls and overall productivity will have the biggest impact, I couldn’t agree more. Conference fatigue – is not something a person generally thinks about. How many conference calls have you participated in where you can’t hear the other person, voices get garbled or you just tune out? Let’s be honest we’ve all experienced it. Hearing the difference is essential whether it’s a regular business or conference call.

The last question was interesting for me because 16 percent think HD-Voice will make an impact in call centers. I was happy to read that because I often have a terrible call-quality experience with call centres be it here or abroad. HD voice (VoIP) will clearly provide immediate benefits to call centres worldwide especially in the increasingly globalized economy.  I think the survey participants had it correct that HD voice will have a major impact on conference calls and video conference calls. Looking back on the survey though, I wish I had put in a choice for mobile phones.  Mobile phone call quality is probably the worst call quality of all, yet it’s probably where we spend much of our time chatting. For me the impact on mobile phones would be tremendous – that said, I would no longer have the excuse that I can’t hear my wife when my after work detour via the sports bar has delayed my return home!

There were a couple good posts over the weekend about videoconferencing. Andy Abramson blogged about how he uses Vidtel  to stay in touch with his wife, while Rich Tehrani wrote about how Tandberg is pushing the enterprise videoconferencing market forward. One very interesting point of divergence, however, appeared to be their takes on desktop videoconferencing.  Abramson points out that hard video phones, like the GrandStream models that Vidtel offers, deliver video “for the masses, and those who don’t walk around with a laptop on their hip like a child”. On the other hand, Tehrani wonders “if we aren’t at a point where netbooks can be turned into desk phones.”

While they may appear to disagree about the preferred method for video communications, I think Andy and Rich can agree that video conferencing seems to be gathering momentum, and that the success of solutions like the ones offered by Vidtel and Tandberg point to growing adoption of the technology. Netbooks and desktop videoconferencing are topics we have discussed on the GIPS blog in the past, but what I think might be added to the discussion is the overall acceptance of higher quality.  Technological barriers to high quality voice and video communications have been overcome, and users are now more comfortable communicating in ways they hadn’t in the past. People no longer need to worry about VoIP or video working properly or reliably, but are actually concerned about which solution delivers the best experience.

To this point, I encourage people to check out the new GIPS whitepaper on HD voice, as well as listen to the sound files below demonstrating the difference between narrowband and wideband/HD voice (a headset is recommended). Just like video conferencing, once people experience a high-quality audio, it is difficult to imagine using anything else.

Traditional PSTN Quality

Narrowband VoIP using GIPS iLBC

HD VoIP using GIPS iSAC

Today, Daniel Berninger wrote a great piece as a guest blogger for the Jeff Pulver Blog about the importance of HD voice in the face of increasing adoption of text communication. He writes, “High Definition (HD) voice can do for the voice industry what it did for the video industry in triggering the replacement cycle that follows format changes.”

There is a growing buzz around HD voice, which involves extending a call’s bandwidth from the 3.5 kHz found in traditional telephony, to anywhere from 7 kHz to around 22 kHz for VoIP communications. This bandwidth extension increases intelligibility and improves overall comfort. By delivering a more true-to-life experience, HD voice makes it easier to understand other participants on a call. For instance, fricative sounds like “s” and “f” are easier to distinguish, and foreign accents become less harsh. HD voice also sounds much closer to in-person speech. This gives participants the feeling that they are actually in a more natural conversation setting. It can also be incredibly helpful in identifying who is speaking in a conference call with several participants. Finally, because users do not need to strain to understand each other, and feel like they are in the same room, participants become less fatigued, especially in long conference calls.

In an effort to address the most common questions about HD voice, GIPS will be publishing a whitepaper on the topic next week. Make sure to check the GIPS in Action page next Tuesday to download the whitepaper, and to hear the difference between traditional speech and HD voice.

“Q: How do you make an HD radio executive bang his head against the wall?

A: Ask him, “What’s HD radio?”"

This was the opening paragraph for David Pogue‘s article in The New York Times today.

It resonated well with me as this is one of the issues that I face when explaining GIPS technology to people when I first meet with them. “Q: What’s HD Voice?” A: HD voice is the clarity of voice you hear when the audio bandwidth, which ranges between 50 Hz-7 kHz using a sampling rate of 16 kHz provides clear, concise speech without jitter, delay and the snap crackle and pops that you get with regular phones…

Just like HD radio, HD voice requires more than a one sentence explanation and the best way to illustrate HD voice quality is to listen to it. Anyone who has used Skype, Googletalk, Nimbuzz or Yahoo! will know what I am talking about – great sound quality.

I’m stupefied that even today most of us still tolerate bad quality on our phones – akin to listening to an AM radio station. A gentle reminder here: AM broadcast technology was used at the start of the 1900′s! Even radio got FM, and now they have HD!  What’s up with that?

While GIPS doesn’t make lager, if it did, it probably would be the best lager in the world. Fortunately, for service providers, application developers and enterprises we do make the best audio and video software for real-time communication… Cue the light refreshing video

Thankfully, there appears to be more recognition of the need for HD Voice and there will be more in-depth discussion of the subject next month when Jeff Pulver gathers industry heavyweights for the HD Communications summit in New York.  We hope to see you there.