HD Voice Nuanced at 'The Cable Show'

While France Telecom and 3 UK were busy bragging about their respective HD voice stories this week -- and nobody caught the fact 3 UK hadn't officially announced turning on HD voice earlier today! -- the cable industry is doing some things I wasn't expecting. Comcast was demoing HD voice and video as a managed/hosted service for businesses with a Polycom VVX 1500 phone during two of the major set top box manufacturers revealed they could squeeze wideband voice out of existing CPE gear via a firmware upgrade. And Cablevision is lab testing HD voice phones for consumer deployment.

First, Comcast is in point of fact in trials with a managed business phone service. You can see a picture of the company's setup with the Polycom VVX phone in the middle. One of the Comcast people in the booth said there was no timetable when the service would be offered to clients -- and gave a shoutout to Jim Machi at Dialogic on the side.

The Puma 5 was released by Texas Instruments in 2007 to support DOCSIS 3.0. EMTA reference designs incorporating the chip as well made sure the FXO ports would support up to 7 kHz of analog sound -- twice that of the standard 3 kHz PSTN definition. Intel bought TI's cable modem chipset business last year and has been doing firmware upgrades upon customer demand. To all appearances one big customer based in Philadelphia has been lobbying for the upgrade, so Intel released it just last month to little fanfare.

Home setting

To fully deliver HD voice in a home setting, the core network has support VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and the firmware upgrade needs to be pushed out to the set top boxes; likely to happen as part of a maintenance release. Once the set top box is enabled, a home customer can either plug in a "$20 to $30" HD analog phone, according to Senior VP Derek Elder, or connect a DECT base station capable of handling 7 kHz analog via its FXO port.

Enabling HD voice via the firmware upgrade to existing devices is a quick and relatively easy way to add more HD voice users, building "critical mass" to get more people using the innovation. It's one more piece of the puzzle for cable operators to work with as they work out business cases and return on investment on the consumer side of the house.