The company says that with its crystal clear, superior sound quality, the introduction of HD Voice is set to herald a new era for mobile communications and a new standard for the telecoms industry. The service virtually eliminates the distance between callers so that it makes calls sound as if they’re in the same room.
The trial, which commences immediately, runs across the Orange UK mobile network between the locations of Bristol, Reading and Southampton, with those participating, having been selected to represent a range of demographic groups, including small businesses and early technology adopters, as well as more mainstream users. Levels of call quality and customer experience will be monitored, and upon successful feedback from the trial, Orange plans to roll out the service nationwide across before the end of the summer.
Tom Alexander, Chief Executive of Everything Everywhere, the company which runs Orange UK, said: “The trial of mobile HD Voice is a significant milestone in the new company’s goal of delivering the best service in the industry. HD Voice represents a huge advance for the customer experience, a great leap forward for the mobile industry and we’re delighted to be at the forefront in bringing this innovation to the UK public.”
The UK trial builds on the launch of service by Orange in Moldova, where it has become the first operator in the world to offer the service. HD Voice offers an improvement in the sound quality of traditional mobile voice calls due to a wider speech bandwidth of 50–7000 Hz compared to the current narrowband speech codec of 300–3400 Hz. HD Voice uses the WB-AMR (Wideband Adaptive Multi-Rate) speech codec to deliver significantly enhanced sound quality while utilising the same network resources.