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March 01, 2009
Guest Blogger: Daniel Berninger - “The Promise of High Definition Voice Beyond Skype”
Skype's high definition (HD) voice and unmetered global termination offers remain at odds with a revenue model sacrificing both of these attributes. Skype's success and strategy mirror the pre-world wide web AOL. The future of Skype like AOL looks bright only until there exists a open communications alternative. This requires an un-Skype
leveraging open interconnection, open protocols, and unlocked devices. The global SIP ecosystem already includes a substantial number of end points between devices sold to enterprises and consumers. Enabling HD represents a very compelling reason to end the fragmentation that leaves SIP networks mere standard definition (SD) on-ramps to the telephone network.
Tying revenue to the telephone network encourages companies to hold users captive. Skype can ignore the cautionary tale of AOL as long as the SIP ecosystem retains the telephone network dependencies. Free World Dialup will do its part by encouraging existing members to adopt HD, making HD the focus of new membership outreach efforts, and working to find compelling HD content. However, not much will happen until the movement gains participation of other SIP networks as well as the rest of the companies in the infotech value chain.
Telephone network voice quality remains unchanged since the 1950's when the current encoding standards were established. The basis for an Internet HD voice ecosystem already exists in broadband connections and SIP devices supporting the G.722 wideband codec (e.g see Polycom and Siemens Gigaset). Obstacles in ease of use and content associated with HD voice remain significant, but they do not differ substantially in magnitude from challenges end users suffered in early days of the
world wide web.
Creating demand for HD requires only getting end users to experience HD (see the Siemens Gigaset demo ). SD drops the two thirds of voice energy that lies outside the 3khz frequency response of traditional telephones. People exposed to HD voice will no more likely to settle for SD than in the case of HD formats for entertainment. Experiencing HD requires compatible equipment on both sides of a connection, so the people adopting HD have an incentive to encourage everyone they call to get HD devices.
HD will displace standard definition in some contexts, but the primary opportunity lies in creating new types of communication content. HD will make it easier for the hearing impaired to use telephones. It will improve the productivity of conference calls. HD means never having to spell out letters via the military alphabet code (A as in Alpha). The mediocre quality of SD does not convey the nuances that carry the emotional content of voice. HD ends the repetition of words necessary to overcome the ambiguity of sounds in SD (e.g. 15 versus 50) .
A format change from HD to SD promises to trigger a replacement cycle and sales growth for the presently shrinking telecom equipment industry. The communication equivalent of the world wide web awaits an open Internet communication alternative to Skype.
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Daniel Berninger is CEO, FWD. His bio can be seen here.
Tags: VoIP, Daniel Berninger, HD VoIP, Jeff Pulver
Posted by jeff on March 1, 2009 05:22 PM | Permalink
Additional resources: #140conf events | Watch the Jeff Pulver Show | Jeff's Qik Videos
Comments
Of course I meant Dan (not Jeff), and G.722 in that last post. It's late! :-)
Posted by: JC at March 27, 2009 09:19 AM
Jeff, you are so right. I couldn't believe when I first started dealing with VoIP about 6-7 years ago everyone wanted g729 to save bandwidth. It seemed to me that providers were (and still are) on a race to the bottom with lower quality than the PSTN and now in most places they don't even have a cost advantage.
Luckly, we specified G711, so upgrading to G711 is an easy option as no extra shaping or bandwidth is needed for the switch to HD. I hope, once enum etc is sorted we'll see HD VoIP with e164 numbers having a real advantage...
Posted by: JC at March 27, 2009 09:17 AM
Dan,
Thanks for driving another stake through the analog-is-good-enough zombie. You've covered all the key points about the problems with our public phone system's 3.4kHz cut-off. Here's one more. Formants, which show up as peaks in a spectrogram, were discovered by researchers to be important markers that help us process and understand speech. Our legacy phone network removes F3 and higher formants, causing us to misinterpret, for example, certain consonants.
The HD experience is better! Consumers will notice the difference.
Posted by: Andy Green at March 10, 2009 03:49 PM
AUDIO HD... somewhat neglected by many companies such as Apple with its Iphone.
Posted by: JChristian at March 10, 2009 02:31 AM