Sounds promising
Mobile operator Orange has announced it's trialling high definition voice technology on its Bristol, Reading and Southampton networks and that it plans a full UK roll-out of the service before the end of this summer.
HD audio is so called because it promises both greater clarity and depth of sound, as well as ‘virtually' eliminating the effects of distance between callers. HEXUS.channel readers were given a preview of this kind of technology by German technology outfit Fraunhofer earlier this year.
"The trial of mobile HD Voice is a significant milestone in the new company's goal of delivering the best service in the industry," said Tom Alexander, boss of Everything Everywhere, the company that runs both Orange and T-Mobile in the UK.
"HD Voice represents a huge advance for the customer experience, a great leap forward for the mobile industry and we're delighted to be at the forefront in bringing this innovation to the UK public."
Orange has selected participants in the trial to represent different demographic groups, such as early-adopters and small businesses. Provided the trial delivers the call quality improvements anticipated, Orange will roll-out the service to all its UK customers by the end of this summer.
Here's what Orange has to say about the technology and a vid: "HD Voice offers an improvement in the sound quality of traditional mobile voice calls due to a wider speech bandwidth of 50-7000 Hz compared to the current narrowband speech codec of 300-3400 Hz. HD Voice uses the WB-AMR (Wideband Adaptive Multi-Rate) speech codec to deliver significantly enhanced sound quality while utilising the same network resources."
