15 Million Potentially HDVoice Capable End-points Deployed in Cable-Land!

Earlier today Doug Mohney of HDVoice News posted a short item from The Cable Show 2011. He was speaking to Derek Elder, Senior Vice President of Arris, a manufacturer of cable network infrastructure. The company claims that it has 15 million Arris end-points deployed, all of which are potentially capable of HDVoice.

To be more specific, these various end-points would be G.722 capable given a firmware upgrade. But there is a catch…the user-end interface is a standard analog RJ-11. That means that a digital voice subscriber would require correspondingly capable analog phone.

The legacy PSTN standards define how analog phones are built. The frequency response of devices is deliberately constrained in order to protect the network. Thus a wideband capable analog phone is at present a very rare bird.

Nonetheless, the company is able to demonstrate wideband voice using this approach in their Atlanta lab. That means that the firmware truly exists, as does the requisite hardware. So it would appear that there may be an alternative to the integration of SIP/CATiq that has been dominating the cable landscape with respect to HDVoice.