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garrettjsmith, 09/01/09

HD Voice? HD VoIP? Wideband Telephony is here. Oh my!

What’s that? You can hear me now? Good.

So you might not have actually ever heard of Wideband Telephony, but surely you’ve heard about it. After all, it’s the technology that VoIP pioneer Jeff Pulver claims will result in a rebooting of the VoIP industry.

Today, Wideband Telephony is taking the VoIP industry by storm causing a surge of new product and service offerings to hit the market from a variety of powerhouses. All well and good; but what is Wideband Telephony really? And more importantly what does it mean for your company?

Let’s take a closer look.

What is Wideband Telephony?

Wideband Telephony, also known as industry trademarked terms HD Voice (Polycom) and HD VoIP (AudioCodes), refers to the use of higher quality voice codecs to deliver audio quality far superior to any cellular, PSTN or “traditional” VoIP call. A voice codec (if you’re unfamiliar) is what converts an analog voice signal to a digitally encoded version.

Just how superior is Wideband Telephony to traditional calling? Very. G.722, the most popular and widely used Wideband telephony codec, captures the sound spectrum up to 7,000Hz (7 kHz). This means nothing until you learn that the average cellular or PSTN call only captures the sound spectrum between 300 - 3,300Hz (3.3 kHz). With twice the sound spectrum captured you get exposed to a whole new range of sound that increases the clarity and crispness of the calling experience. Hence all the excitement.

But what does that mean for you?

The Implications of Wideband Telephony

Well, it depends on who you are. For an average, every day residential user, Wideband Telephony won’t provide much benefit at this point. That’s because in order to experience a true Wideband call both participants must be using a Wideband codec and Wideband phones. Most people you are likely to call these days aren’t using Wideband Telephony. However as VoIP continues to take market share from land lines and cellular networks move to 4G, Wideband Telephony’s presence will increase.

Wideband Telephony is picking up steam in the business sector. If your business has a high volume calling environment, such as an inbound/outbound call center or a large sales and marketing force, you gain immediately benefit from the usage of Wideband Telephony. The benefit for telephone-centric organizations and departments lies with the ability to increase conversation comprehension. Given the clarity and precision Wideband Telephony provides, agents and associates have an easier time recognizing and deciphering conversations, thus increasing their ability to process and retain information. Sure, it’s more of an indirect benefit. Yet the prospects of an entire organization getting more out of their calls should be enough to pique more than few executive’s interests.

Maybe even yours.

Getting into Wideband Telephony

Wideband Telephony starts at the voice carrier (like Bandwidth.com), and today many VoIP service providers support the G.722 Wideband voice codec. If they don’t they soon will.

Next you’ll need to ensure that your IP based phone system (hosted and premise) or VoIP gateway also supports the G.722 codec. As you can tell, capability and support are essential to ensuring a quality Wideband calling experience.

With a Wideband friendly service provider and system in place, the last stop is the desktop. Given the growing support for and adoption of Wideband Telephony, a number of VoIP equipment manufacturers have released desktop IP phones that support Wideband codecs. Led by Polycom and their HD voice line-up, you can find IP phones that support Wideband codecs from many popular manufacturers such as Aastra, AudioCodes and Snom. Snom has been especially active in Wideband with the release of the Snom 820 and Snom 870. Although there are a number of choices available today, expect to pay a premium for them. Over time prices will fall, but for now you will pay a little extra.

Oh and be sure to watch out for lower priced options. As Wideband Telephony enthusiast Michael Graves has reminded me on several occasions, lower priced options have inferior quality transducers that are rarely up to spec for true Wideband calling.

Summing up Wideband Telephony

There is no doubting that the use of Wideband Telephony through voice codecs such as G.722 is the future for IP-based communications. The ability to capture a broader range of the voice spectrum resulting in an increase in a participant’s comprehension of a conversation is too big a benefit to be ignored. Though a promising technology, the questions you should be asking yourself about Wideband Telephony are when and how. When is the right time for your organization to begin using Wideband Telephony and how do you go about enabling this capability throughout your organization.

These questions can be answered by determining the relevance of Wideband to your organization and identifying which services and systems needed to support it. Today, most of you will find that a full fledged Wideband telephony upgrade isn’t necessary. But at a minimum you should begin to plan for and perhaps begin early trials of the technology. For example, make sure you choose a VoIP service provider who can enable your transition to Wideband with a network that supports it.

Because as good as Wideband Telephony looks, it sounds even better.

About the author
Garrett Smith is a VoIP industry expert and VoIP equipment authority currently serving as VoIP Supply’s Director of Marketing and Business Development. Garrett has worked with thousands of customers and products over the last six years giving him unique perspective and insight into what works and what doesn’t when it comes to VoIP. You can get more insights from Garrett by subscribing to his blog, SmithOnVoIP.com or following him on Twitter.

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