HD Voice: You have to hear it to like it

The company that made the voice codecs for Skype's VoIP offering is now betting enterprises are ready for better quality voice services. Global IP Systems, or GIPS, (Oslo Børs: GIPS) is one of the prime proponents of high-definition (HD) voice, a new higher quality voice technology now coming into the market for IP voice and video conferencing systems. 

But even GIPS executives admit, HD voice is an acquired taste – something businesses have to hear to believe.  They point to a growing number of companies using HD voice to retain business customers and sell new applications.

"People realize we need to push for this," said John Gallagher, marketing manager of the San Francisco-based GIPS. "There needs to be recognition that there hasn't been an improvement in voice quality since 1937 – if anything, voice quality has been deteriorating because of cellphones."

"People aren't asking for it, but the reason people haven't been asking for it is that nobody knows something better exists," said Jan Linden, vice president of engineering for GIPS. Service providers who are offering it, such as Orange in France, are signing up customers by the thousands and finding HD voice is a strong component in customer retention, even if it doesn't drive new revenues, Linden said.

In fact, Europeans in general are beginning to clamor for HD voice, according to GIPS customer Communigate, which sells software to mobile and broadband operators including AT&T and Verizon.

"Here in Europe, we have seen serious interest from users, especially for conferencing calling," said Jon Doyle of Communigate . "If you are in Europe and using digital phones, the quality is good, but here the difference is when you have a speaker phone –you really start to hear the difference when multiple people in a room are speaking, the spatial sound is much better with HD voice."

Communigate also is using HD voice to improve the quality of its softphone and finding great improvement in voice when the user is using a laptop without headsets, Doyle said. "We have an application called Pronto, and HD becomes very important when the laptop is open and the user isn't using headsets, for dealing with echo and packet loss. I think it's much more than just quality, it is also making the sound quality good on bad networks such as WiFi."

Nimbuzz is using GIPS to offer a free PC-based application (soon to be available for Macs) that combines instant messaging, VoIP, chatting, texting, etc., into one social networking application and uses HD voice to deliver quality, said Tobias Kemper of Nimbuzz.

Nimbuzz gives away its application for use over the Internet and Internet-connected mobile phones and makes its money from partnerships with handset makers that pre-install the applications as well as network operators that use it as a data service value-add, Kemper said. And while Nimbuzz isn't giving out user numbers, the company is growing at a pace of 25,000 new users daily, Kemper said.

"HD voice plays a big role for us," Kemper said. "We set out to become an IP-based communications company, and to allow operators to play in this as well as handset manufacturers. We've always intended to take a mass-market approach, so we are on quality, reliability and usability. With our service, if you want to do a conference call, you can do it between Skype, MSN and Google Talk – it's a very straightforward thing. But to do that, you need to have solid call quality to offer to your customers."

Service providers, including mobile operators, that deploy the IP media processing necessary to offer HD voice are expected to have a first-mover's advantage that will help customer retention, Linden said. Telstra in Australia, in addition to Orange, has taken that position. Linden calls GIPS' solution "a little more than just codecs and a little less than an application or device."

"The biggest value is how we integrated all these pieces -- echo cancellers, robustness against packet loss, jitter and the arrival times of packets on the network," Linden said. "You need components that take care of each. When you introduce video, you add lip synchronization, managing the bandwidth, and all of those things are different components. We have state of the art solutions for each of them, but in the end, it is about integrating those so you have everything working together. So there are no weak links. You get the total experience."

(Commercial alert: GIPS has a White Paper that explains the value of its solution on Telephony's Web site – it's free).

GIPS' Gallagher believes HD will pick up momentum as many of the players involved take their message to the market. Companies such as AudioCodes and Polycom are pushing HD in their gear, and service providers were at least showing interest at last month's HD Voice Summit.

"It can be a long hard road trying to educate customers," Gallagher said. "The more they can hear it, though, the faster HD voice will be adopted."