My main motivation for writing about wideband telephony is that I truly believe it is a game changer. I’ve experienced it myself and while it’s not always perfect it’s still much much better than a normal telephone call! The benefits and practical uses both in personal and business senses are plentiful but the ones that stand out immediately are that less concentration is required listening to the other party, and female voices sound much more richer and natural (at least, to me). I will write in further detail in future postings about the benefits and practical uses but first I want to start with an introduction to wideband and how the PSTN is dead, baby.

You’ve been using the ringy dingy for a long time, baby! Even before you started talking, it’s almost certain your ma or pa got you on the phone to ‘talk’ to a relative or friend. Since then, you’ve been using the same device – the telephone. They come in all sorts of colours and form factors, and some are even mobile or cordless, but they all essentially consist of a headset and a dialpad (or maybe even a rotary dialler when you were young!) and were your gateway to the world.

The problem you probably never really knew you had? It probably never actually crossed your mind how bad the person on the other end of the phone sounds. If you actually sit back and think about it, the comparison is astounding. Fifty years ago, scratchy LP vinyl recordings of music were commonplace. At the same time, the boffins at Bell Labs put together the rulebook which dictate how phones turn people’s voices into 1′s and 0′s to be sent across their new digital phone networks. These rules seemed like a good idea; marginally improve the sound quality of the carrier phone network that was the norm at the time and keep the last bit of the link between your house or business and the exchange analogue.

But that was 50 years or so ago. Using the same metaphor as above, LPs have gone the way of the dodo. So has the cassette, the portable walkman, CDs and minidisc! AM radio is only used by boring taxi drivers and sports nerds and FM radio is about to be replaced with “digital radio. Dare me to start on TV? That’s gone from a fuzzy black and white  image to glorious technicolor and up to digital TV with hi-definition plasmas. Betamax and VHS and DVDs have all succumbed to Bluray. Yet your phone still has the same scratchy, fuzzy sound it always has!!

Why you should throw your phone away: The reason why your phone sounds crappy over the phone is because of that 50 year old phone network, which I’m going to refer to as the PSTN (standing for Public Switched Telephone Network) from now on. This is the important bit: As you talk, your voicebox and mouth generate sounds as low as 30 and right up to 18,000 Hz. Although the lower frequencies are where most of the speech energy and voice richness is concentrated, much of the intelligibility of human speech occurs in the higher frequencies. When the Bell boffins originally designed the phone network, they determined that a listener did not need to hear all the frequencies that make up the human voice to determine the words being spoken, so determined that the phone network only needed to carry signals from 300Hz to 3400Hz. So, have you ever said ‘fifteen’ over the phone and had the person on the other end ask if you said ‘fifty’? It’s because those harmonics above 3.4Khz aren’t picked up and sent through the phone network.  It’s also why words like “fifth” and “sift” sound very similar to each other over the phone.

How does Wideband fix this? Well, here’s another name for the PSTN: Narrowband. The names come from the ‘band’ of sound that can get sent across the medium.  With the PSTN, it’s 300-3400Hz. With wideband, depending on the flavour, you’re looking at glorious technicolor – anything from 150Hz to 7100Hz right up to 14000Hz!!!

How VoIP is a real game-changer: The dawn of ubiquitous broadband internet access everywhere you go and the increased power of computers has given rise to “VoIP”. You might have heard of this and there are many different flavours of it. If you plug headphones into your computer, you can use a whole myriad of software to communicate for free or otherwise; either to people using normal telephones or their computers. A good example is Skype, which can call both. Many businesses these days have “IP Phones” or “VoIP Phones”, which are fantastic and offer many benefits over standard PBX systems. These IP Phones are really miniature computers themselves with dedicated headsets. Whatever the computer, it’s got the potential to bypass that pesky PSTN – which is what we need in order to free ourselves from this scratchy, squawky existance of the telephone we’ve grown up to love and hate.

More to come soon!