HD Voice is making gradual in roads into mobile networks worldwide. Fifteen operators are now supporting HD voice, although this figure is expected to increase with the growing availability of HD Voice enabled chipsets and handsets.
Orange has been the leading carrier with HD Voice and has now launched service in Moldova, France, Armenia, UK, Spain and Luxembourg. Other carriers include Tata Docomo (India) SFR (France), Mobistar (Belgium), Vipnet (Croatia), Mobinil (Egypt), Megafon (Russia), CSL (Hong Kong), Wind Mobile (Canada) and TIM (Italia).
There are currently 25 mobile phones on the market that are compatible with HD Voice from Alcatel, HTC, LG, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson.
W-AMR speech technology is standardized in 3GPP Release 5. The new speech-compression algorithm doubles voice bandwidth (50–7000 Hz) compared to the current narrowband speech codec (300–3400 Hz) without extra radio or transmission requirements. According to 3GPP, 12.65 kbit/s or higher coding bit-rates provide high-quality wideband audio (lower bit-rates of 8.85 and 6.6 kbit/s are for temporary use during adverse radio conditions or periods of cell congestion). In subjective tests it was shown that the HD Voice wideband codec produces better results than the best narrow-band codec (12.2 kbit/s).
A newly published report is available on the GSA website.
