Orange lаunched HD quality voice services in UK

One month after the launch of HD quality voice services in Armenia Orange launched this service in Great Britain. With its crystal clear, superior sound quality, Orange's introduction of HD voice is set to herald a new era for mobile communications and a new standard of phone voice quality.

With this launch Orange anticipates the wish of the subscribers concerning the quality of voice services. Orange conducted a poll of 1,000 business users in the UK and found that 75 per cent believed a clear call quality to be the most important aspect of their mobile device; with 33 per cent saying they routinely struggled to hold phone conversations due to the noisy environment they work in.

HD Voice service makes a sound as if callers are actually in the same room. HD Voice uses the WB-AMR (Wideband Adaptive Multi-Rate) speech codec, which benefits from a wider speech bandwidth of 50-7000Hz compared to the current narrowband speech codec of 300-3400Hz. The WB-AMR codec also delivers significantly enhanced sound quality whilst utilizing the same network resources.

Orange Armenia has launched High Definition voice services already in July 2010, and became the second mobile operator in the world giving this possibility to its customers. Orange also introduced the first handset supporting HD functionality to Armenia, thanks to which Orange customers in Armenia are provided the possibility to benefit from this world technological innovation much earlier.