The call for speakers was prefaced by a Dan Berninger guest post on Jeff Pulver’s blog entitled, “The Promise Of High Definition Voice Beyond Skype.” Of course, Dan is CEO of FWD which is repositioning itself as a champion of wideband voice.
On the manufacturer front we have new wideband capable hardware from a number of manufacturers. Witness Polycom’s interesting, if pricey, video phone announced last week. The VVX-1500 supports several wideband codecs. We also have new products or announcements from Snom, Siemens Gigaset, Audio Codes and activity from GIPS, and Skype…just to name a few. Heck, even Verizon’s new HUB is theoretically wideband capable. OpenPeak, the devices creator, uses CATiq standard hardware which supports wideband via G.722.
There are so many things implied by the transition to wideband voice. It’s essentially the death of the PSTN. And yet, as revolutionary as that might be, it’s still an evolutionary process. The excitement surrounds the fact that it can finally take VoIP beyond the just a low-cost-PSTN-replacement into the realm of things that we’ve yet to imagine. There will be new applications made possible through the availability of dramatically better call quality.
I don’t even know who’s speaking and I’m actually thinking of finding some way to attend the HD VoIP Summit. I’d be interested in hearing from anyone else who is planning to attend.