Crystal clear
Orange has rolled out its High Definition Voice service across the UK in a bid to improve the sound quality of traditional mobile calls.
The service aims to cut the sound of distance between callers plus reduce background noise as well as annoying hisses and crackles of normal calls and is free to customers with an HD Voice enable handset.
Orange said HD Voice works especially well in noisy environments, producing clearer and sharper calls, which it believes will please about one third of Brits who site background noise as their biggest disturbance in mobile conversations.
HD Voice runs on the 3G network and uses the Wideband Adaptive Muti-Rate (WB-AMR) speech codec to provide better audio quality due to a wider speech bandwidth of 50-7,000 Hz, compared to the current narrowband speech codec of 300-3,400 Hz.
Currently, new versions of the Nokia 5230, X6 and E5 plus Samsung Omnia Pro support HD Voice, with further handsets available in the coming months. Orange will also label up its products and have demo units in store to make it easy for customers to spot HD ready handsets.
"Although what we use our mobile handsets for has evolved significantly in the past few years, the way we make mobile calls hasn't changed since the 1990s. So we're proud to be the first telecommunications brand in the UK to change this and offer customers a revolutionary new calling experience," said Tom Alexander, chief exec of Everything Everywhere, Orange's parent company.
The service has already been rolled out in France, Moldova and Armenia.
Orange has previously tested on its Bristol, Southampton and Reading networks and hailed it a "huge advance for the customer experience". It has also released a video demonstrating the new service.
