Global IP Solutions and HD VoiceGlobal IP Solutions and HD Voice

When it comes to voice quality, better is certainly...well, better. The issue has always been whether customers will pay for better quality.

The term "HD voice" popped up in a few conversations I had at VoiceCon Orlando, and one of the companies that's most associated with the effort to produce high-quality IP voice is Global IP Solutions. GIPS first gained attention as the maker of the codec that Skype used to deliver much better voice quality over the Internet than anyone had seen to that point.I recently spoke with Joyce Kim, GIPS's chief marketing officer, and Larry Golob, senior director of business development. They agreed with others I've spoken to that there's no standard industry definition of "HD voice;" Joyce Kim said, "For us internally, we define HD as wideband and superwideband codecs," and in turn she defines wideband as codecs that operate in the 6.4 kHz - 7 kHz range (G.722 is the standard 7 kHz codec), and superwideband as 8 kHz and over--though she added that she's not certain the difference between wideband and superwideband is very distinguishable to most users.

But though GIPS initially made its name on the strength of its codec, the company has expanded into being more of a voice processing company, and its signature product family, called "Voice Engine," encompasses jitter buffers, echo cancellation, etc.--"all the components that make high-quality voice work," as Joyce Kim puts it.

"Our whole pitch has been that a codec is not enough," Joyce told me.

GIPS OEMs Voice Engine to the likes of Avaya, Cisco, IBM and Siemens, as well as to Yahoo and Google for those companies' web-based voice offerings. GIPS's announcement at VoiceCon was that Voice Engine would be deployed by CommuniGate, a software vendor whose products are deployed by SaaS providers; the GIPS Voice Engine will be incorporated into CommuniGate's Pronto! (exclamation point theirs) client, which is used in network-based mobile UC offerings.

When it comes to voice quality, better is certainly...well, better. The issue has always been whether customers will pay for better quality. Since GIPS is an OEM, they're not selling directly to end customers, and Joyce Kim said she's not sure anyone has put a discrete price tag on the value that higher-quality voice brings to a voice product offering.When it comes to voice quality, better is certainly...well, better. The issue has always been whether customers will pay for better quality.