Next week at HD Comm ’09 (special discount of 20% if you use the code “HDConnectNow”), Julian Spittka, Product Manager and Sr. Engineer, Skype will be speaking in the afternoon around the topic of “The Path to HD Market Adoption.” He’ll no doubt talk about the wonders of SILK, but what else might he reveal?
With Skype for SIP getting a lot of play this week since ShoreTel has announced that it is the first vendor to be “Skype for SIP” certified, will there be an announcement to support more than G.711 and G.729 codecs? If you want to play in the HD Voice world and the big (enterprise) boys, you have to support G.722 and start thinking about coming to the table with AMR-WB in your pocket.
Or will we hear “SILK, SILK, SILK” all the time?
Why AMR-WB? AMR-WB is not a very good wideband codec its not very Bandwidth efficient and there are other much newer codecs technologies that provide superior performance to AMR-WB, in terms of voice quality, bandwidth efficiency and packet error resiliency. Newer codecs also typically achieve very low jitter buffer delays by using time warping techniques. AMR doesnot support this. If HD is a 21st century solution let’s use 21st century coding techniques.
PP
AMR-WB is the de facto’ standard for the cellular community until something else comes along that everyone can agree upon. FT and a number of cellular handset manufacturers are lined up behind it.
Two dissenting points…
1) Defacto does not mean good
2) It’s not defacto. It’s the only standardized WB Voice codec in 3GPP. The 3GPP2 standard(ized) WB Voice codec is EVRC-WB which has all the advantages of improved VQ, bandwidth efficiency and resiliency over AMR-WB. It is also 21st century technology. We should aslo be looking beyond just Voice. We should be looking at Audio coding. To allow us to use a single codec for Voice and Multimedia application. Suggest you look at the AAC low a latency audio coders for VoIP and MM.
/PP
Given the relatively conservative nature of hardware designers in this field, AMR-WB looks to be the only game in town for HD on mobile at this time.
Realistically, other options might emerge in the marketplace down the road, but the train is leaving the station…
Interesting discussion. So in based on your websites aim
“We intend for this site to be the go-to place for the latest news and information about HD Communications, including upcoming events, press releases, committee information, and ultimately a vendor-neutral archive of all things HD.”
I’d hope that you could include information about things that are just not AMR-WB. If we use the approach because HW designers are timid then we are lumbered for the next 100 years with AMR-WB (like we’ve been stuck with 4kHz telephony for 100+ years)
I’d hope you’d recognize other 21st century solutions
AAC LD coders, VMR-WB, EVRC-WB, G.718 (EV-VBR).
Just some notes on some of the above.
1)VMR-WB and G.718 have a AMR-WB interop mode.
2)G.718 and EVRC are evolving to superwideband/audio coders. AAC is an audio coder.
3) one of your charter members, Audiocodes already supports EVRC-WB.
/PP
If you’d like to provide pointers to such information, my email is on the website.