Orange is ramping up its planned roll-out of mobile high-definition (HD) voice services in Europe with the addition of France, Spain and Luxembourg to its 2010 roadmap.
Orange has commercially launched a mobile HD voice service in Moldova in September 2009. The company also launched HD over VOIP in France and plans to roll out the technology in Poland and Spain.
The company said that its UK customer trial of mobile HD voice will start from Spring and will run for three months. It plans to extend the range of HD voice-compatible mobile handsets across Europe, with pricing and handsets to be announced at the time of launch in each market.
According to Orange, HD voice uses the AMR-WB (Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband) speech codec, which provides audio quality due to a wider speech bandwidth of 50-7000Hz compared to the current narrowband speech codec of 300-3400Hz. The AMR-WB delivers enhanced sound quality whilst utilising the same network resources.
Olaf Swantee, senior executive vice president of the global mobile business at Orange, said: “With mobile HD voice, we are delivering true customer innovation – one that will genuinely enrich and transform our customers’ lives.
“By being the first to innovate and deliver a new mobile voice experience, we provide a compelling and differentiated proposition which sets Orange apart. High-definition voice is the future standard for mobile communication.”