Last week, I attended the first HD Communication Summit, here, in New York. 

I have to confess, the concept of high definition voice transmission was new to me. 

Yet, by the time I left the auditorium, Jeff Pulver and team certainly made sure I was up to speed. (For the purpose of full disclosure, although I am a “telco guy”, I am primarily focused on market analysis and vendor scouting in the fixed broadband consumer data space. That keeps core voice service topics outside my purview).

So why HD-quality voice transmission, if for decades standard-definition 300 to 3000 Hz service quality has done just fine for most of us?

Among the arguments, once people have gotten a taste of what wideband voice communications is like, they wouldn’t want to turn back - ever!  

What’s more, in an environment plagued with ubiquitous, low-to-no margin voice service pricing, the prospect of a high definition communications offerings could re-introduce differentiation capabilities among carriers otherwise plagued with subscriber line losses, flight to email, and mobile substitution. 

This, of course, hinging on the assumption that consumers subscribing to HD voice would gladly pay a premium depending on their choice of standard versus high-def codecs. 

In Jeff Pulver’s own words, with HD voice offerings in place, “people will start to purchase home lines again because it sounds so damn good”. 

Turns out, leading carriers have long started looking into enabling HD communications services across both fixed and mobile platforms. If ever, the timing is opportune as virtually all communications services carrier are amidst upgrading their existing networks from analog and partial digital to true end-to-end IP delivery of voice, video, and text.

From France Telecom’s Orange and Telecom Italia, to Deutsche Telekom (note: my employer), major European carriers tasked their R&D departments to assess and unlock the potential of the HD voice opportunity beyond the corporate setting.

This doesn’t mean that Europeans have said good-by to standard voice services quite yet. But they are ahead in some respect. 

State side, US carriers seem less enthused - at least officially.

Yet, although there’s been little-to-no official announcement from the likes of AT&T and Verizon, I find it hard to believe that neither carrier wouldn’t have at least some form of HD communications blue prints ready to go to market if conditions saw it necessary.

My guess, as ample bandwidth and sufficiently powerful processing power in both PCs and mobile devices increasingly becomes the “new normal”, bandwidth and chip-intensive services such a video conferencing and telepresence will begin to scale across consumers markets relatively quickly.

Add to that the millions of new and existing PlayStation and xBox live online gaming fans communicating via VoIP regularly for testosterone-laden in-game chats and banter, and it’s not hard to imagine that in-place HD video will soon demand an HD equivalent for voice.

Hey, how knows? Maybe, in a not so distant future, you’ll find yourself in front of Verizon’s new version of its by-now classic TV commercial.

Only this time, it’s “can you hear me now - in HD?”