Wideband Telephony Some Facts
There is no question that along with Polycom’s expertise in video conferencing, the company is well know for its understanding of the important audio element of business communications as well.
With the return of Polycom co-founder and CTO Jeff Rodman, this episode of Polycom on Demand reviews the emergence of wideband telephony and really dig into what it is and how it can affect you.
The show also features an A/B comparison between wideband and narrowband audio during Jeff’s portion of the interview.
Listen to this show:
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Wideband telephony is ‘hi-fidelity’ telephony. Traditional telephone calls have less than four kilohertz bandwidth (300Hz to 3400Hz) and sound worse than AM radio. Wideband telephony has almost 8 kHz (actually 50Hz to 7000Hz) of bandwidth and sounds better than FM radio, almost approaching CD quality.
A good human ear can hear frequencies up to 20kHz, although most of the frequencies of the human voice are below 3kHz. That said, there is some important information contained in frequencies above 3kHz, in particular the information you need to distinguish an ‘S’ sound from an ‘F’ sound, which is why we have to say “‘S’ as in Sam, of ‘F’ as in Foxtrot,” when spelling things on the telephone.
With wideband telephony the necessary high-frequency information is heard so you can actually distinguish between an ‘S’ and an ‘F’. There is also some other non verbal information in those higher frequencies, possibly even tonal indicators of the mood of the person on the other end of the line, information that would make for a much more valuable telephone experience.
Wideband telephony also contains more lower, or bass, frequencies, down to 50Hz, compared to the 300Hz lower limitation of the PSTN, giving voices on wideband phones much more ‘presence’.
For the end-user, upgrading to wideband telephony is comparable to upgrading from standard definition TV (SDTV) to high definition TV (HDTV). Once you have experienced it you will not want to go back, but until you experience it you may not think you need it. Of course you will only experience wideband telephony when calling another wideband customer, but this is a great feature for service providers.
Once they get one customer using their VoIP service, that customer is going to try to convince all their friends and family to sign up for the same service so that they can all enjoy wideband communications when talking to each other.