Today in New York Jeff Pulver organized an event that may become the "kick-off" for High Definition sound for all telecommunications.

The event took place in the New World Stages a Manhattan Theater that offered an  intimate setting with a lot of interaction between the speaker and the public.  Sometimes the speakers may have even felt they were on stage.

Jeff Pulver made quite an impact with his vision that like in the TV industry where government initiative helped advance a single HDTV standard. Similar sould be done for HD Telephony and would create tremendous value for the whole telecom sector and HD quality voice would be the corner stone to take the telecom sector to a new level. The regulator role of Government helped create the magnificent quality we enjoy on our HDTV sets. Now it could do the same to get us pristine audio quality in all of our phone calls.

Pulver pointed out that HD communications may be the critical missing piece to start generating significant value creation. Listening to the different speakers it became apparent that the HD initiative might precipitate and catalyze the entire telephony space and once again create a higher standard of voice quality for telephony in general. Dr. Christian Stredicke, the founder of snom Technology AG, Berlin, focused on how a multitude of factors affects voice quality from small things like microphones, over codecs different devices use to artifacts created through multiple transcodings. This makes it imperative to have a common quality standard that guarantees a simple "out of the box experience" and full interoperability among all HD devices.

Mythbusting - Wideband codecs implies high bandwidth but this is actually not true.

The consensus at the meeting seemed to be that HD is a key quality that will drive the need to have "End to end VoIP" and also may be the catalyst to take the telecom network worldwide to the next level. Another interesting comment that resonated well was: "The human mind is the best voice recognition engine and can hear through sound better than any filter" To give the listener the full undistorted High Definition sound will make it easier to listen for longer periods of time and increases comprehension. This is especially true in more noisy environments and situations like conference rooms. From an ABP point of view I am really happy that we now can offer the new snom MeetingPoint conference phone a HD quality state of the art conference room phone that also includes a lot o other innovative features to make a conference room phone in a business even more useful and productive.

Some interesting sound bytes were:

Cable Companies and MSO’s may soon overtake the conventional carriers putting hundreds of thousands of HD phones in consumer hands.

Wireless will soon have HD and the quality of Wireless may soon be better than todays landlines.

HD Communications will be in the center of most large corporate wide deployments and should be relevant for ABP's larger Resellers and Integrators focusing on mid sized and larger business. This will not only be of value for conventional PBXs but also of specially interest for ABPs partners looking at OCS deployments with snom IP phones.

Last but not least, it was quite striking to hear that last market studies show that today about 70% of business phones are already IP Phones.

After listening to this group of industry specialist it becomes very clear that HD communications may be the turning point that will drive the entire industry from TDM legacy phones to the world of IP Telephony. It may also be the trigger to change the financial reality in the telecommunication world and once again create a motivation to invest and upgrade the old and stale legacy infrastructure that makes up today's worldwide telecommunications network.

Visibilty of HD Voice is still very small however this may be an underlying Volcano getting ready to erupt.

Robert Messer, ABP Technology

More information on this summit

http://www.hdcomms.com/