Can I Just Tell You How Much I Like HD Voice?

Wow.

Every time I spend all day on a HD conference and then someone on a cell phone calls in I am reminded of just how horrible cell service is. It's worse than the 300~3300Hz stuff we get on the regular PSTN, which is saying a lot. Anyway, I'm just ranting. Thanks for listening.

BTW, an interesting fact came out when we were tinkering around in our conference. We have the ability to do TTS (text-to-speech for you non-telephony folks) as well as play .wav files for everyone in the conference to hear. The other day Anthony Minessale (lead FreeSWITCH developer) found a sound of crickets chirping. It's perfect for those times when you ask for help on the conference and are greeted with silence. Anyway, it happened that everyone but me was on a 8kHz connection for one reason or another. I was connected with 32kHz Polycom Siren 14, aka G.722.1c. Tony played the crickets sound and asked if we heard the crickets chirping. I said yes but everyone else said nope. After a few seconds of head-scratching Tony realized that I was on 32kHz and I was the only one who could hear the crickets.

The moral of the story: If you want to hear crickets chirping then get HD voice! :D

Okay, okay, I admit maybe that's not the most ringing endorsement of HD voice, but it is a curious phenomenon and it does demonstrate that traditional 8kHz voice has issues beyond whether someone said "S" or "F"... Anyway, if you haven't downloaded and tried out FreeSWITCH just yet then definitely do so soon! I highly recommend it, and not just for HD voice. It is more stable and scalable than Asterisk. Heck, it's more powerful than any commercial solution I've ever seen.

-MC