Can you hear me? HD Voice and Its Implications

Written By Anatoli Levine, IMTC President and Director, Product Management – Americas at RADVISION

Who heard of High Definition Video? Oh yes, thank you, so silly of me, of course everybody did – walk into any electronics store, and admire – clear, bright, juicy picture, hundreds of HDTVs of all sizes smiling at you, all at the same time. We like it and want to use it daily..
But what about audio? We had High Definition audio (remember what Hi-Fi stands for?) way back – in the times when you needed a few close friends giving you a hand with 25” TV being brought in the house, High Definition sound was abundantly available, so we did experience and we do know what good sound quality is.

So let’s connect the dots. This blog is about Internet Communications, also widely known as VoIP. On cell phones, we are used to crappy voice quality and dropped calls – and we don’t even get irritated after so many years of training. Regular telephony, delivered over analog or PSTN, is almost an apogee of goodness – at least it was until few years ago. Yes, yes, nowadays VoIP is reliably deployable and we can enjoy the same voice quality as in PSTN.
But is it time for the new experience? Enters HD Communications Summit.

When I talked to Dan Berninger a few months back, when he started planning of the Summit, my initial reaction to HD Voice idea was – why do we need it? Reliable calls – of course, but what’s wrong with PSTN quality? Well, as Dan rightfully noted, we don’t know what we don’t know – as we didn’t have a chance to experience HD Voice in our daily communications, we don’t know what we are missing.
So I’m looking forward to the Summit which will take place in New York City on May 21st with the hope to find some answers. Will my presentations to the customers more convincing, if delivered in HD Voice? What codecs should be used? What’s the economic rationale behind this technology, and how would we maintain interoperability in this new space? What will be the psychological effects of this new technology? I’m sure answers will be found in the lively discussions.
There is one more thing I’m really curious about – as today we need an option of answering calls with or without video (early morning ad hoc video call? brrrr, I’ll pass, thank you), will we need a new option to decide if we want answer a voice call in HD or not?

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