The telecommunications industry isn’t known for innovation, and its hottest products right now, such as the iPhone weren’t invented by telecoms and are not part of the wireline business.
Here’s another innovation the phone company has had almost nothing to do with: HD Voice. There are plenty of initiatives to improve voice quality, but the phone company is delivering phone calls according to the same specifications it used in 1959, wrote Daniel Berninger, CEO of Pulver’s Free World Dialup in a blog post entitled The HD Connect Manifesto.
“The frequency response of a phone call is 300 Hz to 3.3 KHz,” Berninger told InternetNews.com. “That’s less than AM radio, which goes up to 5.6 KHz.”
So Berninger and Pulver are bringing the nascent HD Voice industry together in a one day conference in New York City on Thursday, May 21, 2009 called The HD Communications Summit. “The HD Summit came out of the observation that there are a lot of HD voice projects out there, but they were struggling,” said Berninger. “It’s a lot of work to create something new. We called folks and found about 50 projects across telecom, cellular, cable, and wireline. Everyone has skunkworks — they’re not yet mainstream projects — but we’ll help them compare notes.”
Berninger said that this market, if it coalesces, will be led by the device makers. “Everyone will need a new phone every 18 months.”
Asked whether IT departments would really do that, he pointed out that individuals are still buying cameras in the recession and that IT departments are still upgrading PCs.
