Answering One More Question About HDVoice

Picking up where I left off some time ago, there was one more question arising from the earlier thread in the VoIP Forum at Broadband Reports. PX Eliezer asks:

4) G.722 is royalty-free. That being the case, and if it is not a bandwidth hog, and if it sounds great, then why do so many Voip providers, and so many manufacturers, not support it? In other words, why has adoption been so slow?

There are many factors that have contrived to slow the progress in implementing HDVoice on a broad scale. So many in fact that just pondering them has delayed my response to your question. I didn’t want to drift around a range to topics and make the matter appear utterly insurmountable.

Happily, Doug Mohney of HD Voice News has a recent post at TMC that covers the matter nicely. It’s called, “Debunking Five Major Myths To HDVoice.” I especially like the manner in which Doug characterizes money & politics as network layers 8 & 9. It’s so very true.

As Aswath Rao so rightly points out, from the perspective of land line telephony (ie, not mobile) we can do HDVoice completely without carrier involvement. That’s what has gotten us to this point.

My employer uses HDVoice every day by combining a standards-based SIP hosted PBX (OnSIP) with HDVoice capable end-points (Polycom, Gigaset & Counterpath.) We have off-loaded all inter-office calling to unmetered (free) SIP over IP. We pay metered rates for calls to/from the PSTN. This is where carrier involvement persists.

As the FCC has called for discussion on ‘the sunset of the legacy PSTN” perhaps we are at a good opportunity to finally break from the telco technical standards of 1937 and their similarly ancient business model?