HD-Telephony: Hip or Hype?

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Wideband Conferencing: Tony has done a great job summarizing key aspects of wideband technology.

My company ZipDX (zipdx.com) has been delivering a wideband-capable audioconferencing service since last year. The number of wideband endpoints is relatively small, but it is growing quickly. Polycom just announced a couple of new speakerphones last week; we have been testing these with some of our customers since the beginning of the year and the response has been very positive.

Tony mentioned conferencing, and I think this is one application where wideband really makes a huge difference. I explain to people that my brother and I can talk to each other on crummy cellphones and it doesn't matter too much; we can each finish the other's sentences.

But in a concall, you are trying to recognize voices, you are dealing with unfamiliar accents, and often the speaker is muffled or obscured by background noise. Wideband can make a big difference in all of these situations. The more quality audio content you have at your disposal, the easier it is for your brain to overcome the other impairments.

Conference calls that last an hour or more (not infrequent, these days) can be quite fatiguing, and wideband helps with that. Just like you strain your eyes when the picture is out of focus, your ears strain when you have to recover the audio information that is lost due to a narrowband codec.

The biggest thing that we as an industry can do at the moment is drive interoperability. We need to get all these endpoints, PBX's, functions like FreeSwitch and services like ZipDX working seamlessly, so that end-users really do get an enjoyable experience.

As the population of wideband-capable endpoints grows, the network effect will take over. It is pretty eye- (or ear-) opening to be on a conference call with a mix of wide and narrow-band participants. Those in narrowband really stand out for how bad they sound; you don't know what you're missing til you hear it!; Posted by: dpfrankel Posted on: 04/15/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use