Voice: The Killer Mobile Application

The world is on hunt for the next killer application for mobile phones and mobile networks. Last week the US went crazy over the iPhone. We talk about mobile Web, mobile video, mobile location - based services, instant text messaging, mobile email, social networks, new generation of mobile games. But let us hold on for a second. What about voice?

What do I mean by "voice"? Try to explain... I talk to the handset and the other party can hear me. And she talks to her handset and I can hear her. The method and apparatus patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, after changing the world forever, is still in use today. The howstuffworks.com site explains in detail how this happens. Important here to note is the quality of the voice conversation. The wired telephones of the past century established a tradeoff between call quality and network economics. To allow more simultaneous calls on the network, the audio bandwidth is limited to about 3,000 hertz. All of the frequencies in your voice below 400 hertz and above 3,400 hertz are cut off. Again, the howstuffworks.com page demonstrates the frequency clipping effect. And it is really hard to believe, despite all the technology advances, we have been stuck at this point for more than 100 years now. In modern vocabulary this is referred to as narrowband voice coding, the technology responsible for transmitting our voice over the telephone network.

Actually thing have recently even got worse, thanks to finance departments and stock exchange investors, forcing the network operators to cut down on OPEX (Operational Expenditures). The OPEX savings are done by using immature VoIP (Voice Over IP) backbone networks and interconnects, often resulting in completely impossible to understand conversations between two parties (especially on long distance / international calls). I have this everyday, when my business partners call me from abroad and I can hardly understand what they say. Often I hang up and call them back (the return call is routed over different path) trying to catch a better connection. Is this the state of the art in voice communications AD 2007? Give me a break...

More and more frequently I use Skype, whenever I'm within a broadband Internet coverage. Not because Skype is free, but because it offers better call quality (hear it, Mr Carrier?). Instead of narrowband, Skype makes use of wideband codecs, whenever possible. The resulting call quality, while far from high fidelity, is far superior. Some mobile carriers are looking into wideband codecs (like T-Mobile with Ericsson). What is funny they claim it a "voice quality hereherto unknown". Funny, because AMR Wideband (the technology they use) transmits only half the bandwidth of a 50-years old FM radio we use everyday. Anyway this is the move in the right direction, but we are still far from that point, and true HiFi calls and voice conferencing for years is going to be available only over the Internet.

I have no idea why this issue has been forgotten for so long, especially as - to quote Greg Papadopoulos, the CTO of Sun Microsystems, once you have taken part of a true high fidelity voice teleconference, you never want to go back.