Audio Codes’ Alan Percy on Wideband Telephony

Carl Ford has a nice podcast today interviewing Audio Codes’ Alan Percy about the coming wave of wideband telephony. Alan gives a good overview of the codecs involved, which points to the capabilities that are being developed in coming Audio Codes products. He also describes the logic behind using different codecs on wired vs wireless networks.

Remember that Audio Codes actually makes chipsets that show up in many different forms of hardware. Their ability to support Microsoft’s RTA and a Skype proprietary codec, in addition the established G.722, G.722.1, AMR-WB, etc bodes well for wideband transcoding capability in gateway devices. He also points out that their new line of IP phones will support a broad variety of wideband VoIP codecs. That may give them an important advantage when competing against more established vendors in the end-point space.

One aspect of wideband telephony that is very interesting is that it may enable much better quality podcasts. So many podcasts simply sound bad because at least one party is called in via the PSTN and therefore limited to 4 khz best case bandwidth. That we suffer poor quality podcasts is really curious to me, especially with regard to podcasts by companies in the VoIP / IP comm space.

I know that wideband calls recorded on my Polycom SoundPoint IP650 are dramatically better than recording of normal conference calls.  With more wideband capable devices coming available things can only get better.