The Return of Toll Quality VoiceThe Return of Toll Quality Voice

Audioconferencing and cell phone services are starting to raise the bar for quality.

One of the more freshly-minted pieces of conventional wisdom in our industry is that people have grown to accept poor audio quality in their voice communications; this is generally ascribed to the emergence of cell phones as the predominant voice-telephony devices. We've traded the (relative) clarity of landline POTS (plain old telephone service) for the benefits of mobility, and despite the poorer voice quality of cellular, few people (if any at all) would give up their cell phones out of dissatisfaction over audio quality.

But we don't have to settle for bad-quality audio. For one thing, good sound quality isn't just important for voice-only telephony; it's every bit as critical for video communications. As Jan Linden of Google said at our WebRTC Conference-within-a-Conference at Enterprise Connect last month, "The most important part of video is audio." If you can see another person in a videoconference but can't make out what they're saying, the experience is basically worthless.

There are also plenty of indications that enterprises understand that better audio quality is critical. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about a Wainhouse Research study that found enterprise users would choose cell phones as a preferred device for connecting to audio conferences--if the quality were not an issue. When quality is an issue (i.e., now), almost none of the respondents considered cell phones the preferred device for audio conferences.

At Enterprise Connect, I saw signs that vendors and potentially their customers are starting to view audio quality as more important to enterprise communications. The most obvious example was Dolby's major presence on the show floor, with its clever use of old-fashioned British telephone booths--which served the dual purpose of staging a demonstration of a soon-to-roll out audio conferencing service using Dolby's iconic sound quality; and giving a nod to Dolby's service provider partner in the effort, BT. Dolby and BT say the cost of the new service will not be much different from traditional conferencing, which is a good thing--as outstanding as the sound quality of the service proved to be, it's still an open question whether enterprises will pay extra for it, at least right out of the gate.

An even more encouraging bit of news comes this week from AT&T, which reportedly is preparing to make HD Voice a cornerstone of its voice over LTE strategy. This would be an enormous step forward, and one that could revolutionize cellular telephony and our perceptions of it. Once again, however, the question is whether people will pay for the improved quality, at least initially. In addition to needing the AT&T network's support for HD voice, the service obviously can only work between two devices that also support this level of quality--which presumably will add to the cost of those devices.

I keep saying that the cost issue arises "at first," because I think that eventually HD Voice will make it into our ears. Support for HD on the mobile devices will come down in cost to the point where it becomes a checkoff item for phones; and better-sounding conference calls may catch on once people spend enough time in them that they truly notice the difference when it's not there.

When VOIP first emerged, its pioneers needed to show that they weren't underestimating the importance of voice quality as they rolled out a new technology that many traditionalists believed was incapable of delivering such quality. So VOIP proponents got into the habit of genuflecting toward the "toll" quality of the PSTN, enshrining as a benchmark something that was, in fact, relatively new in the history of long-distance telephony. Sprint's iconic "pin drop" ads, and the all-digital fiber optic network that they touted, debuted more than 100 years after the first long-distance call was made in the U.S. The PSTN wasn't always "toll quality"--and up to now, neither were the cellular networks or the Internet (which, thanks to Skype and WebRTC, will be the long-distance voice network of the future).

But we're starting to see encouraging signs that these newer networks are embracing technologies that will get them to this higher plane. And that will be good for business.

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