Posts Tagged ‘HD Commmunicatiions’
Videoconferencing and telepresence rigs provide more information for communications options, but HD voice may prove to be the quickest and most cost-effective upgrade for businesses of all sizes.
Don’t get me wrong; TANDBERG and Polycom and all the other visual-solutions have their place in the scheme of things, but they are A) expensive B) need more bandwidth and C) Need more care, feeding, and prep, due to A & B.
Real world example: When I was hanging out with Jeff Pulver yesterday, one of his meetings was at the Embassy of Ireland. We were ushered into an elegant and beautiful conference room with a nice TANDBERG video conferencing rig in one corner, video camera adjusted at table height.
As Jeff started his dervish windup on the goodness of HD over vanilla voice, I looked over at the TANDBERG and started calculating how many tens of thousands of dollars it cost to buy it — then multiplied by 2, for the end point sitting back on the Emerald Isle. Let’s say, it’s around $30,000 for the single end point.
Compare that $30,000 to a $300 or so HD business phone and you’ve got two orders of magnitude of expense for the baseline videoconferencing setup. Put another way with the simplified math – you can stick 100 HD phones on desktops and/or conference rooms for the price of one video end point.
Those HD phones will get a lot more day-to-day use than the videoconferencing rig as well. People will just “pick up the phone” and if they don’t get who they need, they can leave a message, while the videoconferencing rig needs to have an arranged time of use so someone is on the other end — it’s not a spontaneous “Gotta call bob” type of thing. In addition, people will tend to primp themselves and the video area to look good on camera and running around to prep for that conference.
HD voice is likely to have a lower peak impact upon bandwidth and the network, but more sustained. Assuming a ratio of use of 1 phone per 10 deployed in E-whats-his-name’s equation, you’d have 10 phones x 64 kbps, so 640 Kbps of bandwidth distributed across the network using G.722. Compare that to a single point “surge” of 2-3 Mbps for a typical videoconferencing rig. You could spin out various scenarios to skew numbers either way, but you get my point.
Installation also is a lot easier than a videoconferencing end point; enter the videoconferencing system integrator to adjust for lighting, positioning, and plenty of other factors.
HD voice: Plug in phone to network. Phone number or SIP URI to dial another HD phone (OK, that’s simplified, but you get my point…)
With HD voice now a “baked in” option with Avaya and Polycom phones, upgrading to HD voice is almost a no-brainer for improving corporate productivity, unless you installed non-G.722/non-upgradable VoIP phones last year.
The day started at 8 AM at the Old Ebbett Grill, the first of Jeff Pulver’s stops for his whirlwind tour of Washington D.C. as he promotes HD voice.
About 24 to 26 people showed up for breakfast, a combination of people who wanted to learn more about HD voice and those who wanted to *ahem* talk about Jeff’s other passion these days, the #140 Character conferences.
From there, Jeff dashed across town to the Embassy of Ireland and a discussion with an official there about the goodness of HD and efforts to get a HD hotline started between the United States and another countries. The official is part of a telecom working group of Embassy Row attaches and he is curious as to where his peers and their countries stand.
Another cab ride and a brownbag lunch HD voice discussion sponsored by Mintz Levin at 701 Pennsylvania Avenue. Jeff believes that HD voice will be able to bring back value and revenue to the telephone companies — value that was lost and squeezed out when vanilla VoIP came along.
Random data point: Nearly all of the 18 lawyers and policy wonks here — including the gray-haired ones — are on Twitter and Facebook.
After lunch, it’s off to meetings at PBS, Gannett, and a dinner of some sort.
HD Communications: The Third Wave
Posted on: June 25, 2009
Or why you should care about wideband. Really.
Voice communications is entering into its third wave of evolution. A third wave move to HD Communications represents an opportunity for carriers to redefine themselves and reassert their superiority relative to the “me too” VoIP service providers that have driven cost down, but at the price of quality.
The First Wave: Phone 1.0
Defining the first wave of voice is easy: Phone 1.0, our good friend the PSTN/POTS. In the beginning, standards were set, copper was pulled, and many people got phone service. The quality of the voice call was defined between 30 KHz and 3000 KHz over a 56Kbps analog phone line and reliability was written into the DNA of generations of phone people as five nines.
It was easy to set (dictate) standards because universal voice service was driven by a government sanctioned monopoly. But that same monopoly stifled innovation and kept prices artificially high.
The Second Wave: Convenience and Cost
The second wave of voice communication delivered convenience and lowered cost – C&C, if you prefer. Monopolies were broken up, IP and VoIP battered their way into common wisdom and the concept of the Next Generation Network (NGN) was born.
Everyone gained convenience in the second wave, the biggest example being mobility delivered via cellular carriers. Web sites can now be voice enabled and the tools are available for various mashups between applications and voice.
Competition and VoIP also drove down costs. In less than a decade, VoIP moved from a novelty to the primary way to move around phone calls on long distance calls, pushing down costs to where carriers now charge fractions of pennies per minute for calls.
The two pillars of the second wave were driven from the “bottom up” by consumers and innovative companies working to outmaneuver the resource-rich but innovation slow incumbent carriers – and then by incumbent carriers who saw the advantages in leveraging technology to make their own operations more efficient.
However, convenience and cost didn’t come without a price. The sacred definitions of what a voice call over the PSTN should sound like from end-to-end got trashed – quality was lost. Cellular networks compressed voice calls in the name of spectral efficiency and then transcoded them over to the PSTN. VoIP provided the ability to cram more calls on leased lines, but compression, transcoding, and codecs all inflicted their own small insults.
In addition, the PSTN – good old Phone 1.0 – provided an out for anyone using VoIP. You don’t have to peer, you can route a call onto the PSTN for pennies a minute and if the call doesn’t sound good, you can always blame it on the legacy network.
The Third Wave of HD Communications: Raising and restoring quality
Emerging today around the world, HD communications is about raising the bar for quality, while restoring quality to voice communications. High-quality voice with the baseline G.722 wideband codec is about five times better than the stock PSTN call. Big business already recognizes that high-quality voice is a big winner today for conference calls and international calls Using HD, people understand what is being said better because there’s more audio information to use and less need to “process” to fill in the blanks with a foreign speaker or sorting out who is who on a conference call.
More importantly, HD is about restoring quality to end-to-end voice communications. If a service provider is delivering high quality voice, it has to make sure that every part of the call is the best from end-to-end; there’s a lot less slack for blaming it on the other guy. More importantly, you want “the other guy” to deliver his end of the call in HD so everyone gains the benefit, rather than descending to lowest common denominator.
The third wave will be more top-down than bottom up for two key factors. Organizations that recognize the value of high quality voice – C-level executives, enterprises – are willing to write the checks to pay for quality. Service providers recognize that those organizations expect a higher level of service and will pay for it – plus they want escape the downward spiral rat trap of cheap minutes.
While there are some “bottom-up” push from hosted VoIP business service providers looking to different themselves and conferencing services looking for an edge in the marketplace, the vast majority of providers who originally dove into VoIP from the “bottom” looking to snap business away from larger carriers figure they have enough to do with pennies per minute.
Ultimately, cellular carriers will move to high quality voice because people will want more out of their phones. Availability of broadband and smartphones means that there’s little excuse to not be able to implement HD voice.
How far are we from the third wave? The trinity of handsets, service providers and customers
For the third wave of HD communications to catch on, you need to have customers who want high quality voice, handsets that support (i.e. have baked in) HD voice, and service providers who can deliver the service from end-to-end.
In Europe, the trinity already exists, with France Telecom, BT, and other European carriers signing up customers. By the end of the year, those carriers will start exchanging HD voice calls with one another.
Within the U.S., there are a lot of islands of HD, little pockets of business hosted VoIP service providers that are not (so far) talking to each other. However, those islands will start to be pushed to talk to Europe and to each other.
Asia moves forward with HD as carriers in Australia, Korea, and Japan all moving to implement services for consumers and businesses.
Enterprises are going to continue to be the first HD adopters. Global Crossing is already doing one-off HD conferencing for its elite customers and is in the process of productizing HD conferencing. Optimum Lightpath, a division of Cablevision, has taken the lead among cable companies to provide hosted HD voice for its customer base.
Verizon Business may provide the most interesting sign post for HD. It believes that, among its customer base of large enterprises, the earlier adopters of HD will show up in 2010, with widespread demand occurring in 2011.
Bottom line
HD communication is happening, and it starting to move faster.
HD Communications – Cablevision fired the first business HD voice service shot in North America
Posted on: June 5, 2009
Optimum Lightpath, Cablevision’s business arm, has announced what it terms the “first” high-definition voice service for mid-sized to large businesses, with service available in June 2009 in the New York metropolitan area.
The release touts using Optimum’s hosted VoIP service, shiny new Cisco IP phones, and the company’s fiber-optic network to deliver the best quality voice calls to and from anyone “within its business facilities.” The service uses Cisco’s 7945 and 7965 IP phones and since those phones support the G.722 wideband codec, we have HD Communications.
Optimum is offering a turn-key end-to-end solution, probably the best way to roll out the service so it can assure QoS. How many customers will bite on HD-quality for intra-facility calling will be interesting given Optimum’s footprint in the New York region.
From a historic perspective, Optimum/Cablevision has always been “pushing the envelope” when it has come to bringing in new technologies; the company was the first to roll out high speed 50 and 100 Mbps broadband service for businesses before DOCSIS 3.0 was formally locked down.
Interesting questions that come to mind are: 1) Will Optimum promote INTER-business HD calling among the customers who sign up for it? 2) Will this offering speed up the wheels at Verizon Business for a HD voice offering? (OK, probably not) 3) How will Optimum work on expanding/exchanging HD voice calling beyond its own footprint?
Given NYC’s business and international focus, if Optimum isn’t talking to France Telecom and BT about HD/G.722 interoperability now, it likely will be in the weeks to come. Optimum would be in the unique position to build the first HD “bridge” across the Atlantic between its HD island and those in operation/under construction in Europe.
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