As I wrote a few days ago, I've long been a fan of wideband audio for telephony, so I was pleased to hear about trials in Germany last spring. Now this from Wireless Watch Japan led me to today's press release by DoCoMo.
TOKYO, JAPAN, April 3, 2007 --- NTT DoCoMo, Inc. announced today that, in collaboration with DoCoMo Communications Laboratories USA, Inc., it has developed speech coding technology that provides exceptionally high-quality voice for mobile phones, yet only requires the low-level computing power of conventional mobile telephony technologies.
This new technology realizes a wide frequency range of 50Hz - 16kHz, which is approximately the full range of the human voice. By comparison, the frequency range of legacy telephony services is limited to 300Hz - 3.4kHz....
This is not a trial, just a demo at a trade show. It's a new codec, not one of the existing standards and, from these graphs, it appears to use fairly simple logarithmic coding. It's running, in software only, on a DoCoMo business phone, model hTc Z (picture & specs) under the Win Mobile 5 OS. One issue with this new software-only codec is it may not be efficient enough to run on 2G networks — perhaps not an issue in Japan, but very real in other parts of the world.
None-the-less, it's very encouraging to see increasing publicity for wideband audio. It's the way to make mobile phones sound better than fixed-line phones and complete the mobile revolution.
Would you know if any of this technology would make its way over to the US? Nothing seems to get past FCC approval, and it really hinders the consumers' ability to buy the best products available on the market.
http://best-t1-line.com
Posted by: vic | April 15, 2007 at 04:48 PM
Vic, this isn't an FCC approval issue. It's strictly a matter for wireless operators and handset vendors. As I pointed out a few days earlier:
http://blogs.nmss.com/communications/2007/03/wideband_audio_.html ,
GSM operators (like Cingular and T-Mobile US) would need to verify their network equipment was supporting TFO (likely only a configuration issue) and they'd need a source of wideband audio handsets. Such handsets are not yet in production, although the technology exists. Once wideband is deployed on one network, I expect it to spread rapidly due to competitive pressure. The question is how to get it started...
Posted by: brough | April 16, 2007 at 10:10 AM
That looks good! When will it be released in the states?=) http://best-t1-service-provider.com
Posted by: john | November 25, 2007 at 11:17 PM