XConnect's HD Voice Peering Trial: Focusing on Who Rather Than How

XConnect's recently announced plan for a trial HD voice peering federation marks a significant advance in the move to HD communication. The trial, to take place between April and June of this year, will directly connect providers offering HD voice services. That will let them pass HD calls, which provide audio quality superior to that of conventional PSTN phone calls, to one another rather than just among their own customers. The trial thus represents an effort to start building a critical mass of HD-capable voice subscribers. As such, it is as much a commercial effort as a technical one.

Service providers that could drive HD voice adoption in the future fall into four main categories. One is Internet-based telephony providers including Voice over IM (VoIM) services like Skype, Voice over Broadband (VoBB) operators like Vonage, and hosted VoIP/hosted IP PBX providers like 8x8. Most of these are already HD-enabled, or will soon be. A second category is cable telephony providers, which because their underlying voice technology is VoIP, are also natural candidates to move to HD. A third is cellular providers, which can offer HD voice with some network and handset upgrades. A fourth is telecom service providers offering IP telephony services to companies, of both the SMB and enterprise type.

XConnect CEO Eli Katz says he expects a broad cross-section of providers to participate in the trial. Of the above categories, Internet-based providers, which see HD as a crucial competitive advantage and a way to counter concerns about the quality of Internet telephony, are likely to turn out in force. Katz says cable providers from a number of countries have also expressed particular interest.

A key goal of trials of this sort is typically to identify and resolve thorny interoperability issues. And indeed, XConnect notes that the trial will allow providers to "test the interoperability, scalable interconnection, reliability and support of XConnect federation services." At the same time, the company is keeping the technical side simpler than it might otherwise be, by specifying that providers use the G.722 wideband codec, and avoiding issues such as transcoding.

Thus it's clear that the most important aspect out of this specific trial may not be technical results such as the ease of interconnection among the different providers. Rather, it will be the specific combination of participants the trial attracts, because that will serve as a good indicator of which types of providers will most likely drive the growth of HD voice in the future.

XConnect received $10 million in Series B funding in September 2009.