Mobile HD Voice Trial launched by Orange UK

Orange UK has announced a trial of High Definition (HD) Voice across its UK mobile network in the South of England. With its crystal clear, superior sound quality, Orange’s 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.

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.

Further details on the Orange HD Voice nationwide roll out will be made available later in 2010.