Earlier today, I made a phone call that sounded so clear that I felt like I was actually standing next to the person on the other end. Telstra have had HD voice for a while now, but being a long-standing Vodafone customer, I’ve not had the pleasure of experiencing it. Yesterday, Vodafone announced that they were commencing the rollout of their LTE network, but what they didn’t announce was that they are also trialling HD voice.
After an excited, but confused few minutes, I did what all good nerds do, and took to Twitter to find out what was going on, and Vodafone’s customer support team confirmed that I was indeed on their new HD voice network. +
@drfinberg Looks like your on HD Voice which we haven't announced as yet. We've surprised ourselves as much as you .:-) ^DC
— Vodafone Help AU (@VodafoneAU_Help) June 14, 2013
Along with super-clear audio, I didn’t have to struggle to hear the conversation over the busy Melbourne CBD traffic, which apparently was filtered on the other end as well, making it so much easier to have a conversation. No word on when this will start to roll out officially, and seeing as how Vodafone haven’t even announced it, it might be a while, but hang in there, fellow Vodafoners, their network sure is improving.
Should handsets Support hd voice?
HD Voice is fantastic. Telstra do it well, it sounds so clear!
Vodafone’s network is improving sure, but as I’ve seen in the last few days with speedtest and real world examples they still have astronomical latency times compared to telstra and optus, creating a very bad browsing experience.
Case in point, I can let my friend on vodafone 850MHz start loading a webpage neither of us have been too before and then pull out my Nexus 4 on Optus, open the browser, type in the site and hit enter, loading it before his page name resolves.
Do you know what technology they are using behind this ‘HD voice’? My understanding is that voice over LTE has a lot of proprietary fragmentation, so unless the carriers use the same or compatible technologies they may only work when done between handsets on the same network.
This isnt voice over LTE. currently voice calls are still forwarded over 3G/2G. even on Vodafone.
Not sure just yet. But my phone isn’t compatible with LTE.
It’s just the use of a wideband audio codec, instead of the old GSM codec. The frequency response is wider, giving clearer audio.