The Jeff Pulver Blog: Guest Blogger: Daniel Berninger

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April 13, 2009

Guest Blogger: Daniel Berninger - “The HD Connect Manifesto”

The growing adoption of text in the form of email, texting, and microblogging as the dominate mode of communication represents a remarkable development. It avenges the long ago defeat of the telegraph by the telephone. The underlying cause of declining interest voice communication represents a familar story. There exists no difference between the end user experience of a telephone call in 1959 and 2009. The wireless industry made telephone calls mobile. The VoIP industry made telephone calls cheap. Yet, every penny of voice revenue requires the sale of a 1950 quality telephone call.

The inherent advantages voice enjoys over text did not eliminate the need for innovation. Reversing the declining fortunes of voice requires the industry to finally get around to improving voice quality. High Definition (HD) voice can do for the voice industry what it did for the video industry in triggering the replacement cycle that follows format changes. Faith in the status quo remains a significant obstacle in spite of the fact AM radio offers better audio quality than telephones and telephones do not support over half the frequencies associated with human voice.

Voice can convey information that goes well beyond the words spoken to the extent there exist sufficient quality. The cues reflecting emotional state necessary for establishing intimacy get lost with traditional telephone calls. The precision of language disappears along with the high frequencies necessary to convey consonant sounds and low frequencies associate with vowel sounds (hence reliance on A as in alpha type codes.) Communication with non-native speakers becomes nearly impossible without adequate voice quality.

The obstacles to achieving higher levels of voice quality in 1950 no longer exist. A number of recent standards (e.g. 3GPP, 4G, Packet Cable, CAT-iq) incorporate HD options. The current generation of chips available from Broadcom, Texas Instruments, and Infineon all incorporate HD capability. Polycom, Siemens Gigaset, Snom, and Audiocodes offer HD capable IP phones. HD voice represents another application of broadband Internet. The cause of HD benefits from faster and cheaper processing components like everything else in the infotech ecosystem.

The maturity of VoIP technologies provide a number of efficient options for delivering HD voice. The SIP standard enables codec negotiation on a call by call basis. This provides for a greatest common denominator mode where callers enjoy the highest quality shared by their respective devices. There exist at least a half dozen different HD codecs from Global IP Solutions and other companies. Achieving a critical mass of HD devices will take time, but the nework effect issue can get addressed as they did in the case of fax and email.

Efforts to reverse the declining demand for voice services should also co-opt some of the successful aspects of text communication. Touch tone dialing traces to the 1940's. Telephone numbers suffer the same disadvantages that led to the domain name system as a means to protect end users from IP addresses. Adoption of SIP URI's (@sip.myserviceprovider.com) allows service providers to offer the same click-to-connect options as the web and an email like addressing framework. SIP URI's offer a unified addressing framework for passing calls between networks.

Competing with text requires preserving the unmetered global termination associated with the Internet via an the open interconnection policy between voice networks. Resisting interconnection in order to preserve business models that depend on metering voice minutes represents a doomed strategy. Skype, Vonage, and the cableco digital phone offers could easily interconnect with each other and independent SIP networks rather than through the telephone network. The search for alternative business models remains on going, but demand for services charging usage based fees will continue to disappear with or without interconnection.

HD audio quality, click-to-connect, and unmetered global termination or collectively - HD Connect - can serve as the basis for a resurgent voice industry.

Please register for Jeff Pulver's HD Communication Summit planned for May 21, 2009 in NYC to hear from the people and companies leading the transformation of communication from text back to voice.

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Daniel Berninger is CEO, FWD. His bio can be seen here.

Tags: VoIP,HD Communications, Daniel Berninger, HD VoIP, Jeff Keni Pulver

Posted by jeff on April 13, 2009 08:40 AM | Permalink

Additional resources: #140conf events | Watch the Jeff Pulver Show | Jeff's Qik Videos

Comments

Good article,I want to copy it to my blog,Can I?

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Posted by: injection molding at June 16, 2009 09:43 PM

I would hardly call HD Voice a savior of the industry. To hear a sample wav file of HD Voice vs. SD Voice visit: http://tinyurl.com/c3vdxq

Posted by: Zach Garcia at April 15, 2009 05:59 PM

It is meaningless to observe traditional telephone call voice quality is adequate for all the uses of the telephone. This is simply by definition. Applications not suitable for the mediocre voice quality of telephone calls simply don't happen. Standard definition call quality is a filter. Let's see what happens after changing the nature of the filter to HD before arguing we don't need HD. Continuous improvement in voice quality will yield a continuous expansion of the addressable applications and by extension expand demand. Offering the same product for 50 years represents a sure path to declining demand where users have alternatives.

Posted by: Daniel Berninger at April 15, 2009 06:37 AM

i think there is another angle why HD is required item.

The telco landscape is not (well, not only) Skype/cheap IP calls versus Cellular or Wireline.

- The mid-term battle is between internet and its rich communication techniques (web conferencing, social networking) and telco's phone-only service.

- Battle is not only for call $$, but for the time spent on the media (trend is users spending more minutes on internet comms then on phones)

- so carriers have to move from NGN core networks to offer IP-based "social network-like" communication models to subscribers, therefore, have IP-service at the last mile for the user, and not only for enterprise IP-phones, but every consumer.

- And as Telco need subscribers to pay for the service, here comes the HD, as the necessary step to keep user satisfied with the carrier IP-service.

- So actually, HD sounds to be the cornerstone for keeping the landscape of whole Telco industry versus Internet communications.

Posted by: Slava Borilin at April 14, 2009 05:17 PM

I am still not persuaded about HD voice. Text has taken off because it is only as synchronous as the participants want it to be. A phone call means both parties have to submit to synchronous conversation NOW. As to hearing higher quality telephony...???? I would be up for just getting cellular service up to the quality of POTS. Which, of course, would be closer if we could simply run reliable VoIP over cellular IP or better yet, mobility-capable WiFi. Do I really need to hear a pin drop in all its tympanic splendor over the phone line? Not sure. Of course VoIP does provide for improved voice quality if it demanded by the market through the use of codec negotiation...so what is there for us to do but wait and let the market decide.

Posted by: Kingsley Hill at April 14, 2009 01:39 PM

The proposal explicitly includes HD as necessary to provide something new. Use of SIP URI's in conjunction with standard definition calls has not proven sufficiently compelling to move the cause forward.

The argument regarding HD is a argument for continuous improvement. SD calls just work and so should HD calls. The way forward can not get driven by customer demand any more than Intel makes improving processor performance contingent on market research. Improved performance expands the addressable applications. However, we do not know what those applications are before making the performance improvements.

Posted by: Daniel Berninger at April 14, 2009 12:58 PM

I'm not sure I agree that text is such a threat to voice communication. The reason people want a 1950's style voice medium and not much has changed since then is it simply just works.

I agree the un-metered future is ultimately where things are going but I'm not sure HD developments will have as much of an impact as will the use of SIP URIs for people. When the concept of sip domain addresses as replacements for telephone numbers takes off, people will find new life in voice as one of many means to communicate, all with a single address.

Posted by: Rob Wolpov at April 14, 2009 10:57 AM

April 13, 2009

Guest Blogger: Daniel Berninger - “The HD Connect Manifesto”

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