BT Embraces HD Voice More Widely

British Telecom is putting HD voice forward as a key feature for small to medium-sized businesses in the U.K. and enterprises around the world. Last week the company announced HD voice service in a number of BT One product offerings and plans to share more news in a few weeks about its work with Dolby Labs for spatial audio conference calls.

In its announcement, BT said HD voice would be available at no extra charge to all existing and new BT One customers, and underlined HD voice support in BT One Cloud Cisco, BT One Cloud for Microsoft Lync, BT One Cloud iComms, BT One Enterprise Avaya, and BT One Voice anywhere. BT One Cloud Cisco is built around Cisco Hosted Cloud Collaboration Solution (HCS) while BT One Cloud for Microsoft Lync is now upgraded to Microsoft Link 2013, with integrated SIP and Skype. Offered as an on-premise or cloud solution, BT says it is the only operator that can fully integrate Lync 2013 in its network, enabling calls to fixed lines directly from the Lync platform.

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Pat Goss, Director of BT One Portfolio for U.S. and Canada, said any BT One customer should be able to call any other BT One customer via IP and make an end-to-end HD voice call if both of the end-points and networks support the appropriate protocol, typically G.722, SILK, or RT Audio, depending on the hardware and configuration.

However, BT is planning a big rollout for its Dolby Laboratories spatial audio conferencing service. Announced earlier this year at Enterprise Connect, the Dolby solution delivers an HD voice experience with "3-D"-like audio using a combination of a proprietary codec, soft clients, and stereo headphones or speakers. Dolby officials said the solution has "absolutely floored" some of its customers and expects to be able to charge a premium for the service due to the improved experience.

A U.K.-based event should take place in the next couple of weeks, followed by a New York introduction for U.S. enterprise customers. BT and Dolby will also present "brand new" academic research analyzing the impact of voice quality on the productivity of online collaboration.

BT's push of HD voice in the enterprise is relatively new among name-brand Tier 1carriers. Deutsche Telekom and Orange have emphasized HD voice for mobile and consumer implementations, while Verizon has soft-pedaled G.722 support within its network as just another feature rather than a game changer for businesses. Perhaps this will change as AT&T and Verizon move to turn up Voice over LTE (VoLTE) this year, but it is likely to take some large number of months before either U.S. carrier starts to place real value in higher quality voice services for the enterprise.