MTN deploys HD voice

   

 

MTN customers with modern handsets should have noticed a marked improvement in the quality of their voice calls in recent weeks. That’s because the mobile operator has gone live with something called Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband technology.

According to Techcentral, the technology, also known as HD voice, is a patented speech audio coding standard.

AMR-WB was developed to improve the speech quality of calls made and to reduce background noise to deliver clearer audio.

MTN South Africa chief technology officer, Eben Albertyn, says that even when a caller is in a noisy environment, the person at the other end of the line will be able to hear them clearly.

AMR-WB makes use of audio frequencies between 50Hz to 7 000Hz, compared to the much narrower 300Hz to 3 400 Hz used by landline telephones.

Nokia and VoiceAge, a Canadian voice and audio codec developer, to utilise the same amount of bandwidth as traditional audio codecs, developed the technology. It does do by squeezing more voice data into the packets being transmitted over the network.

The original voice codec for GSM networks in the early 1990s was full-rate voice. A few years later, enhanced full-rate was developed, which delivered a significantly better voice audio quality over cellular networks.

Around the same time, the half-rate codec was introduced, but it offered an inferior voice quality over GSM. It was used when demand on the network was high and at a time when network capacity was at a premium.