Is HD voice Really Here?

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

To follow up on my previous post, I would like to continue talking about HD Voice. However, now I’m armed and dangerous – with the knowledge, that is. HD Communications Summit which took place on Thursday, May 21st, in New York City, brought together an outstanding line up of speakers with an amazing depth of knowledge on the subject. The event was organized by Jeff Pulver and Dan Berninger – both can be regarded as VoIP pioneers and experts on the subject.

So what did I learn?  A lot. One thing for sure – HD Voice is here. The technology is here. Yep, we know how to make everyone to sound better, juicier, more vivid and live. Challenge is – “we” is a small technical community. Nobody else knows – and nobody asks for it – therefore, it is not happening. Two excellent presentations, one by Jeff Rodman, Polycom‘s CTO, and  one by Martyn Humphries, GM of VoIP Group at Broadcom, very well explained and demonstrated the differences between regular telephone speech and HD Voice coming with all the live nuances. Nevertheless, many years of bad mobile calls taught us to ask for only two things – first, that your call will actually connect – and second, that it will not drop in a middle ( and if it does drop – start from the “first” again). Great quality voice – sure, will take it – but don’t ask us to pay for it – and again, the technology is not happening. It will require quite a bit of effort to educate and convince – Jeff Pulver’s idea to petition  for “HDV” campaign with FCC is good – still, just don’t drop my calls, please…

Another interesting revelation for me was the fact HD Voice is more than just a codec. Having spend many years at RADVISION, where video is king, the screen by itself is practically always good, the key to the good quality video is really in the mathematical wonders of the codec. Not the case with audio – while codec is important, what can be described by single word acoustics is equally or more important – it is choice of materials and actual mechanical design of the earpiece or a headset, or speakers will actually determine if HD voice will be actually HD. I guess this actually make sound delivery more art compare to a video delivery? Huh, I’m working for the video company in the end of the day, I guess need to be more careful with conclusions.

So for the quick recap – technology is ready, we mastered the art of sound, there is no demand, am I missing anything else? Yeah, technology is ready, and the problem is – too much of it. There is at least twice as many wideband codecs than narrow band codecs. Great selection of not-interoperable codecs! Of course that makes transcoding very important, but also prevents us from leaping forward, as we can’t achieve level of deployable interoperability. G.722 everyone, please!

Here is another recap – technology is ready, we mastered the art of sound, there is no demand, and interoperability is not where it should be.

As I’m wearing two hats here, what it all means? For RADVISION, we will continue to make the picture better and brighter – it worth thousand words anyway, right? However, clear Voice (HD, it is) greatly enhances the picture, so we gladly embrace the “complete HD experience” momentum in the industry. For IMTC, it sounds like a textbook case of “what IMTC does the best” – we can get together all the players in the industry, create base profile and test plan, run interoperability testing, create excitement with amazing clarity of the voice, educate the market and declare a victory! Sounds simple? I hope it is. Let’s start…