Orange says it'll announce trials of mobile High Definition (HD) Voice services in the UK early next year, with nationwide roll-out expected later in 2010.
HD Voice offers higher audio quality for mobile phone calls than conventional technology, although it's only available to customers with a 3G HD Voice enabled handset. Tom Alexander, CEO of Orange UK, described HD Voice as "making it sound as if callers are actually in the same room". It uses the Wideband Adaptive Multi-Rate (WB-AMR) speech codec, which has a speech bandwidth of 50–7000 Hz compared to the current narrowband speech codec of 300–3400 Hz. [Press release]