Conferencing (my business) is a different animal. You’re often talking with people you haven’t met. You’re trying to recognize voices, understand foreign accents, and decipher unfamiliar speech. There’s background noise and double-talk. Now layer on narrowband sampling and encoding, which strips away half of the audio information, and these calls can be disasters.

Ever wonder why you’re exhausted after a 45 minute conference call? It’s because a sizable fraction of your brainpower was devoted to “recovering” the missing information. Spend a couple hours on an HD conference call and you’ll feel a lot better.

Someday, hopefully we’ll all enjoy wideband audio as part of the telecom routine — even on your mobile phone. Technology, as noted, is not the problem (there’s already a wideband codec defined for GSM, AMR-WB / G.722.2). But it’s going to take a lot of time and work to make the subconscious benefits more obvious to the general population, and even to the “specialists” in the field.

A friend of mine suggested a while back that the FCC should mandate wideband audio for all telephony by some date certain. Maybe we should have made that part of the stimulus package!

Incumbents will generally wring every last dollar out of the status quo, resisting any investment regardless of the potential. A such, I think that it will take a major change, revolution, not evolution, possibly by a new player in the game, to drive widespread migration off the PSTN.

That said, I do not think that incumbent telcos will try to ignore this technology. Part of the reason that voice call quality has stayed stagnant the last 20 years is the increase bandwith on the line being dedicated to other uses. Currently I get traditional PSTN voice, 3 Mbps internet, and HDTV over a single copper pair (not a standard install, but all that was available in my particular case). Additionally, I could add a dedicated VOIP connection to the pair if desired.

The incumbents have the ability to offer HDVN if they desire, and I am sure that they soon will offer it, although the price may be higher than some are willing to pay for many years still. It may just get implemented without upgrading the PSTN network. And it will likely not be exclusive in my lifetime (hopefully another 50 years). :)

JAy.

That said, I think some sort of high-quality voice solution will ultimately be delivered by incumbents, not a newbie startup. No carrier will permit the double-whammy of greater spectrum usage AND over-the-top voice cannibalization, and will likely pursue their own, possibly premium priced offering once the demand is validated.

Since I first evaluated the Polycom HDVoice products about a year ago many people around me have started adopting these devices. Starting a month ago the week VoIP Users Conference call (http://www.voipusersconference.org) has been hosted on both wideband (http://www.zipdx.com) and traditional (http://www.talkshoe.com) conference bridges. Thus our podcasts serve as examples of the difference between old skool PSTN and better.

Happilt, ounterpath is about to release a new retail version of their Eyebeam soft phone for Windows that will also be G.722 capable. I’ve been using a pre-release vresion for the past week and it’s excellent.

We need to not only demand better, but also do something about it. Use wideband IP telephony where possible, and push for better where it’s not offered.

There exists no end a debate about which factors have the greatest impact on voice quality or the voice quality required for a given context. The column makes a very simple point…we need to do better! A world where telephone network voice quality remains static for 50 years represents a crazy anomaly in our supposed technologically advanced society. A tremendous amount of information available in face to face conversations gets dropped above and below the 3.4khz pass band of “toll quality voice”. This has really productivity consequences for society. Yes, deal with jitter. Yes, deal with noise and stop making excuses.