By Doug Mohney, on February 8th, 2010
After two years as Ooma’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), Rich “The Dude” Buchanan is departing the company for another project.
Buchanan, an advocate of HD voice via Ooma, announced his departure from Ooma via Twitter (@richbuchanan) on Sunday evening; the company has yet to make a formal statement of either Buchanan’s departure or his replacement. “It’s time for Ooma to soar and for me to focus on a new project and build another world-class team,” he tweeted. “I will miss the awesome team we have assembled at Ooma and I promise to see all of you again.”
His accomplishments while CMO include moving the company away from a celebrity-based branding relationship with Ashton Kutcher to a more successful product/service focus, the growth of Ooma unit sales by more than “100x weekly” through 5,000 new retailers over the past two years — including a strategic relationship with Best Buy — and seeing the company pass over 100,000 units in sales with increasing growth.
In his tweets, Buchanan did not detail where he was going or what he was going to work on, but given his background, including stints at Creative Labs and Sling Media, it is likely he’s working on something in the consumer electronics space.
By Doug Mohney, on February 3rd, 2010
Ovum is putting its two cents worth in for mobile HD voice – but it won’t be money going to mobile operators. Instead, call quality might be the business differentiator between carriers for now. The analyst report also confirms an earlier report that mobile operators will make a HD voice interoperabilty announcement at Mobile World Congress.
Last week Ovum got a demo of mobile HD voice thanks to 3 UK. Call quality was “markedly better,” with sound “clearer and more resonant” thanks to the use of AMR-WB. Overall, the experience was described as “more like a face-to-face” conversation than a normal mobile or wireline call and under ideal conditions AMR-WB is expected to pull a MOS rating of 4.0.
Ovum calls implementing HD voice as a “relatively painless” step for operators that “may sort the 3G sheep from the 2G goats” since in order to deliver HD voice you have to run IP on a good network.
Interestingly, Ovum says that 3 UK has no plans to actually provide HD voice anytime soon.
The Ovum piece goes on to say that HD voice is “of limited commercial significance” since it will be launched initially as an on-net service and not provide a footprint for more money since mobile calls will fall back to PSTN quality when calling landlines.
It also says there is a “working group” of mobile operators working out details for HD voice exchange and an announcement “is planned” for Mobile World Congress.
By Doug Mohney, on February 2nd, 2010
Fraunhofer IIS, the folks that gave us MP3, is bragging about it plans to demonstrate “mobile phone calls in stereo CD quality” over a 4G cellular network at Mobile World Congress next week. Mobile World Congress will have HD voice falling out of the skies, if the rumors and releases are any indication.
Today’s press release from Fraunhofer characterizes the feat as “For the first time, telephone conversations sound as clear and natural as if talking to someone in the same room” — a statement that is almost cliche’ given that numerous other vendors and service have already used the same exact words with codecs such as G.722, SILK, and AMR-WB, among others.
All this revolutionary “new” goodness is packed around the Fraunhofer Audio Communication Engine for LTE-A (Long Term Evolution) 4th Generation cellular networks, a package of audio technologies that is being positioned to upstage AMR-WB with the ability to provide rich media content such as music and sounds being reproduced at their original quality as well.
Fraunhofer is positioning the new codec as the way for 4G network operators to provide “a dramatically improved, highly differentiated communications experience compared to current network technologies” with the the usual benchmarks assigned to other HD Voice codecs: Conference calls will be easy to follow and much less exhausting, phone calls in noisy environments will be easier to understand. However, the exception to others is “being on hold will sound as if listening to a concert on an mp3 player.”
Demos of the technology will be conducted between an “office setting” connected to a “car mockup” using various technologies provided by Fraunhofer.
Underlying pieces of the Fraunhofer Audio Communication Engine (ACE) include a specifically designed MPEG audio communications codec “AAC Enhanced Low Delay” to ensure CD quality audio at very low coding delays and bit rates; robust, multi-channel echo control software to reliably removes echoes, providing hands-free convenience and complete freedom to move around in a room; and a specially matched IP streaming stack and error concealment tools for delivering high-quality audio even under adverse network conditions.
What isn’t talked about in the press release are the potential licensing terms for one or all pieces of the ACE to incorporate in 4G handsets. Nor do we get any side-by-side comparisons between the current dominant mobile HD voice codec, AMR-WB, and ACE; or between ACE and the old, boring, but everywhere G.722.
On the other hand, the transcoding guys must be very happy with this announcement, since it adds Yet Another Codec that may potentially end up in their boxes.
By Doug Mohney, on February 2nd, 2010
CounterPath Corporation has officially announced the latest version of its multimedia softphone, Bria 3.0. The company is heavily pushing Bria’s HD voice and video features in the run up to Mobile World Congress in two weeks.
Bria 3.0 supports 720p (1280×720p) video, incorporates improved usability features, synchronization with Microsoft Office address books, a troubleshooting assistant, improved security features, including support for a greater variety of network topologies, improved firewall traversal and compliance with the latest ICE/STUN/TURN options.
At IT EXPO East 2010, CounterPath officials emphasized an overhaul of Bria to fully support HD voice and video data types from end-to-end, including G.722 and the aforementioned 720p HD video.
By Doug Mohney, on February 2nd, 2010
NEC’s new UNIVERGE SP350 softphone will support the G.722 HD voice codec when it is released in the United States in the second quarter of 2010, said a spokesperson for the company.
Updates to the company’s website to reflect support for G.722 are in progress and are not available line as of press time, but are expected to be made by the time the product starts shipping in North America.
The NEC UNIVERGE SP350 softphone can be used as a replacement or supplement to a standard desktop phone, a VPN-based remote/mobile user client, and has Microsoft Office Outlook integration. It has all the usual bells and whistles for a softphone client, including drag and drop calling, presence information, and collaboration features like audio and video conferencing, applications sharing, file transfer, whiteboard, and instant messaging.
By Doug Mohney, on February 1st, 2010
Phone.com is a sponsor of HD Voice News
At IT EXPO East 2010, Phone..com CTO Alon Cohen gave a relatively clear demonstration of the difference between “SD” voice (in the form of G.711) and HD voice with a pair of sound clips using the same spoken phrase.
To hear the SD G.722 voice clip, click here.
To hear the HD G.722 voice clip, click here.
For a visual representation, Cohen had a couple of nice slides illustrating the differences between the two codecs in terms of sampling rate and CPU & bandwidth usage–
 
Unfortunately, the graphics themselves get a little “jaggy” (i.e. not high quality) when shrunk down to fit a typical web page.
The audio and slides examples were presented as a part of a larger Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 presentation, available for download in .PPTX format here.
By Doug Mohney, on January 29th, 2010
HD voice as a term is coming close to becoming like unified communications — defined and stretched and abused by marketing and PR people to mean exactly what is necessary for the latest product and press releases.
Over the past eight months, I have heard a number of definitions for HD voice. Let me codify and clarify what I — and nearly everyone else who has used the term — means when they use the phrase “HD voice” –
1) A typical PSTN call delivers audio in the range of 300 to 3400 hertz — a range of 3.4 kHz typically.
2) The baseline for wideband voice, G.722, delivers audio in the range of 30 to 7000 hertz – so there’s a range of 7 kHz
3) This would make G.722 “twice as good”/2x in terms of hertz as a typical PSTN call.
4) THEREFORE, HD voice is defined as the ability to deliver audio at least as twice as good as a PSTN phone call.
5) FURTHER, any discussion of HD voice should include the codec or codecs supported, since there are numerous codecs that are described as “wideband” or
“superwideband” or other terms. Other codecs may deliver up to 5.88 times (or 6, if you round upward) as much audio as a typical PSTN call.
6) While some may use octaves to describe the range of sound being delivered on a phone call and this discussion can be somewhat refreshing, many/most telephony-heads and ordinary mortals not steeped in multiple years of choir practice do not think in terms of singing, four octave or five octave voices, or the fact that a piano covers 7.5 octaves.
For reference/discussion purposes –
- The human voice ranges from 80 hertz to 14,000 hertz.
- Humans hear in a range from 20Hz to 20,000Hz.
- A PSTN call can deliver much less than 3.4 kHz
- A dog can hear from 40 Hz to 60,000 Hz.
By Doug Mohney, on January 29th, 2010
LG-Nortel’s iPECS-MG voice platform announced at IT EXPO East 2010 will support G.722 when it arrives in the U.S. during Q2 of 2010.
A spokesperson for LG-Nortel said that the IP side of the platform doesn’t currently support G.722, but it will be “effective” upon the official release of the product in the U.S. The spokesperson also noted that LG-Nortel’s 8800 series of IP phones already support G.722, so only the switch-side codec needed to be updated.
The iPECS-MG PBX solution supports both IP and TDM-based technologies at the same time and is designed for businesses with anywhere from 30 to 300 users. Among its features is the ability to turn off power to user devices for up to 16 hours per day.
By Doug Mohney, on January 28th, 2010
Credit to Dan Berninger for the pointer
The UK is close to being a hotbed for mobile HD voice, if reports are to be believed, and there may be a big mobile HD voice announcement in February.
Techeye was invited by upstart cellular carrier 3 to get a demo for mobile HD voice. Sound quality is descirbed as “the person you’re talking to sounds like they’re four feet away,” but Techeye suggests the demo would have been more impressive on better handsets with a “decent” microphone and loudspeaker; the demo was conducted on “modified Sony Ericsson Cybershot jobbies.”
According to Techeye, 3 UK has upgraded its backhaul network with Nokia Siemens gear so it is now capable of fully supporting AMR-WB (or WB-AMR as they tend to call it in Europe).
Further, an announcement from a mobile HD voice “special interest group” is expected at the forthcoming Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona in February and the news is expected to include a way to interconnect HD voice ready networks.
By Doug Mohney, on January 26th, 2010
Note: Ooma is a sponsor of HD Voice News
HD voice is by no means a “slam dunk” in 2010. There are five significant problems the HD voice ecosystem of players need to address before victory can be declared and wideband calling is as at least as ubiquitous as VoIP calling.
However, four out of five problems needed for HD voice to become widespread do not involve any technology at all, but a willingness to be more open and cooperative. And meanwhile, the fifth (and first as listed below) problem can be solved with the application of existing technology and solutions.
1) Interconnectivity/HD voice peering
End-users want to dial a single phone number and just have HD voice work. Period. End of story. Having seamless HD voice calling regardless of provider is the number one challenge for 2010.
In this writer’s ideal world, a full-up demonstration of HD Voice peering would take place at InterOp in Las Vegas in April, with calls being made between 8×8, ooma, and numerous business VoIP providers – with Cablevision’s network thrown in for good measure.
However, the road to interconnecting HD voice islands has just started.
XConnect (www.xconnect.com) seems to have a scalable, off-the-shelf, ready to use solution for HD voice/G.722 peering in its Global Alliance services. The company is conducting a free trial to take place between April to June, but XConnect needs to take the next step and present clear business case justifications to get service providers to stay onboard after the trial.
Voxbone’s (www.voxbone.com) iNum solution is an interesting alternative for those who don’t have dedicated numbers already tied to the PSTN, but it’s not a scalable alternative for established enterprise users.
Another route to interconnectivity could be the IP Peering Alliance, but no information about its progress beyond Alteva and SimpleSignal hooking up in late October has been reported. A website and a broader list of participants would both be appreciated.
Sprint’s PIN network also presents an opportunity for HD voice interconnect – if the company can hurry up and figure out what it wants to do above and beyond vanilla VoIP traffic exchange.
2) Education and re-education
Plenty of work needs to be done to educate everyone – consumers, businesses, consultants, government, associations – on the advantages of HD voice over existing technology.
Ooma has just broken the ice on the consumer side of HD and it is likely the company will be doing more to continue to educate the masses on the clear benefits of HD voice over existing services based on 1937-era PSTN standards.
From discussions with IP phone handset vendors at IT EXPO and other forums, it is clear the vast majority of VARs and channel partners don’t “get it” when it comes to HD voice offering superior quality and experience over stock G.711/PSTN service.
Channel partners and VARs need to understand that 1) HD voice is something much better than PSTN and vanilla VoIP 2) It does not impose a penalty on the network when compared to G.711 and 3) There’s no price penalty in hardware (i.e. it doesn’t cost extra) – for that matter, it is difficult to find a newly manufactured IP phone in 2010 that doesn’t support wideband.
A small number of channel partner/VARs and others have an active skepticism to HD voice because it sounds “too much like Skype” or “too good” or some other knee-jerk reaction because calls sound so much different, say vendors.
3) Ecosystem communication
Both vendors and service providers need to start talking more and more openly about HD voice and what is being done to further the service. There are a lot of sidebar email conversations taking place right now that need to become public discussions on blogs, forums, websites, and in the media – both trade and national.
4) Clarity in message
The HD voice community needs to harmonize its descriptions of what the technology is. One set of catch phrases repeated five times is better than five different sets of catch phrases repeated once.
For example, HD voice –
a) has “twice the sound” of a regular PSTN call
b) Is five times better than a regular PSTN call
c) Delivers FM quality sound, as compared to AM sound on a PSTN call
d) All of the above
Soon there will be as many and varied definitions for HD voice as there are for unified communications. This is not a good thing.
5) Organization
There’s been plenty of talk around setting technical verification standards, developing service marks for interoperability and the like over the past 7 months, but little concrete action adopted by all.
A more formal trade organization akin to the WiFi Forum is needed to provide formal structure and accountability to set goals. Such an organization is also necessary to provide coordinated planning in effectively addressing the other four issues listed above.
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