Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/01/orange_rolls_out_hd_voice/
Orange rolls out HD Voice calls in UK
New phones required
Posted in Mobile, 1st September 2010 10:07 GMT
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Desperately unhappy with the call quality of the your mobile phone? Orange [1] reckons its HD Voice service is the answer.
You'll need a new phone, of course - Orange has the Nokia 5230, Nokia X6, Nokia E5 and Samsung Omnia Pro in its line of HD Voice-branded handsets. Once you've bought one of these, the HD Voice service is free, Orange said.
What makes the call HD is the use of the WB-AMR [2] (Wideband Adaptive Multi-Rate) speech codec to encode voice signals which are then pinged out over the 3G network - so you'll need 3G coverage to use it and, of course, a phone at the other end capable of decoding WB-AMR.
And since WB-AMR requires a network upgrade to support it, you chums' phones need to be on Orange too.
WB-AMR works by digitising and compressing audio in the 50-7000Hz band. Regular phone codecs work between 300Hz and 3400Hz. It's part of the 3GPP [3] 3G mobile phone standard.
According to Orange, the upshot is "louder, clearer, sharper mobile calls" even "at a football match or concert, on a building site or next to heavy traffic". ®