Pulver Urges Widespread HD Voice by 2015

HD voice could bring “billions of dollars” in revenue back to a stagnant U.S. telecom industry, Pulver said. Transmitting at frequencies from 50 to 7,000 Hz, about double those of conventional calls over the public switched telephone network, the audio technology provides more authentic voice reproduction. Higher quality calls will create more demand for voice services, and phone companies will benefit, Pulver said.

Pulver is trying to design the campaign to avoid pushback “from the lobbyists who like to fight,” he said. “It’s probably going to be a fight, but I think at the end of the day consumers win.” Pulver’s Washington connections could be of assistance, he said. “I have … a few friends now that work in government,” he said. “It hasn’t helped before, but maybe it will help this time. … I don’t know which branch or which agency to go to actually make this happen, or even if any of them will even put their name to it, but I believe it’s good for America.”

The Universal Service Fund could subsidize the effort, Pulver said. If “a fraction of a penny from every phone call that goes into” the USF went to HD voice, that should provide enough money by 2015 to offer high-definition voice throughout the country, he said. The money would pay for wireline network upgrades and new handsets, he said. Pulver said he isn’t waiting for government to complete an overhaul of USF: “I don’t think they'll ever be done.” But deploying HD voice is in the spirit of universal service, he said, because it means better-quality voice across the U.S.

Deploying the technology over wireless and broadband will be easier than over wireline, Pulver said. Those technologies already have enough capacity to handle HD voice, he said. “Wireless will happen automatically” because the wideband codec needed “will be in the handsets,” and broadband already has the technology, he said. Achieving HD on wireline will be trickier, but may be possible without major network upgrades, he said.

The standards for the public switched telephone network haven’t changed since 1937, noted Doug Mohney, who’s working with Pulver in the effort and was the editor-in-chief of Pulver’s VON Magazine. Conventional wireline voice supports audio frequencies between about 300 and 3,000 Hz, and the range is even narrower on cellphones and VoIP, he said. HD voice doubles the range, so callers can hear all the tones they would in conversation in person, he said.

The improved quality of HD voice is most noticeable when talking with small children and non-native English speakers, Mohney said. On a cellphone, “nine times out of 10, [children’s] voices are so high and so squeaky … that you don’t understand them,” he said. “On an HD phone, you understand them.”

The telephone industry has long operated on an innovation model of “replication,” improving technology only to mimic competitors, Pulver said. VoIP companies like Vonage didn’t advance voice communication much, choosing to use the cheaper technology to take phone company margins rather than add functions, Pulver said. VoIP technology developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s is “really just a copy of what happened in the ‘60s,” he said.

HD voice “hasn’t been talked about a lot” because phone companies aren’t seeing enough demand from their customers, Mohney said: “That’s starting to change.” France Telecom is putting HD voice on its cellphones, and in the U.S., Cablevision is selling HD voice to business customers, he said. Verizon Business, historically a more conservative company, believes early adopters will want HD voice in 2010, and the product will go mainstream in 2011, he said. The technology appears to be spreading from the top down, with big Fortune 500 companies the earliest adopters, he said.

Nokia and Sony Ericsson have announced support for the wideband HD voice codec in their next handsets, Pulver added. And although it’s not been officially announced, Telstra is “thinking” about rolling out HD voice residential service in Australia this December, he said. “The fact that it’s happening in France first, and then in Australia, and not America, I find a little absurd.”

Market, Technology Developing

The HD voice market is still in its early stages, said Dovid Coplon, senior director of product management at Global IP Solutions, on a separate USTelecom webinar Tuesday. Conference calls and video conferencing are expected to benefit the most from HD voice, he said.

To get the most out of HD voice, companies need an HD- capable microphone, a codec suitable for the usage scenario, quality enhancement and end-to-end network HD voice support, Coplon said. Bandwidth estimation is critical to ensure a consistent experience, he said. Additionally, network clean-up is necessary because networks are subject to jitter buffer and packet loss concealment, he said.

The codec is a key component of the wideband audio technology, Coplon said. But the HD voice codec landscape includes everything from open source to proprietary codecs, many with very complex licensing situations, he said. HD communication additionally involves acoustic hardware, echo cancellation and other signal processing, he said. When implementing a wideband codec, providers and application developers must be aware of the need to adapt to changing network conditions to confront the trade-off between bit-rate and audio quality for optimal performance, he said. Any wideband codec must be resilient to packet loss and deliver the kind of flexibility that enables deploying HD voice for a variety of real-world scenarios, he said.