Pulver: Time to reboot the communications industry

Scorning the status quo of PSTN and mobile phone call quality, industry pundit Jeff Pulver says he is on nothing less than a mission to "reboot" the communications industry around high-definition communications--regardless of how a call is made. "Just because someone at AT&T defined [voice calls] as between 300 and 3000 Hz means we have to settle for that sixty years later?" Pulver said. "[WTF]? We have technology, we can make it better."

Pulver described his efforts to rally all the stakeholders in high definition communications--including voice and video--as a "quest." While he may sound a bit like Don Quixote at times, the purple pundit of VoIP has garnered the support of Polycom, Siemens, GIPS and AudioCodes to his cause for his HD Communications summit in New York City on May 21.

"The timing can not be better," Pulver continued. "With the rescheduling of SuperComm, what we're doing may be the most significant event in communications this year... Now is a great opportunity to do this when everyone else is standing still and wondering what to do next. If we're successful, we'll provide hope and new jobs for people providing the reboot of telecom around the world."

Why HD voice? Pulver cited several reasons why the technology should be significant. VoIP has dramatically brought down the cost of phone calls, so margins are non-existent. Deploying HD voice services on both landline and mobile systems would provide carriers with a service differentiator and a product with a price premium people are willing to pay for.

HD voice has the potential to reverse the trend of declining landline sales, Pulver asserted. "People will start to purchase home lines again because it sounds so damn good," he said.

And there's no excuse to settle for anything less than the best voice quality in mobile communications, either. "We've grown up [with mobile] living in an idiocracy of communications," said Pulver. "We've been taught that mobility meant that voice quality doesn't matter because you're mobile, we've been brainwashed that mobility means low quality. The marketing folks at these carriers have been lowering communications IQ."

Some carriers and service providers are already on the HD bandwagon--but not in the U.S. Carriers Telstra and Orange have announced support for HD while Nokia and Ericsson are incorporating wideband codecs into their phones.

Public safety could also presumably benefit from the national adoption of HD voice. "Maybe I've been watching too much NCIS, but if you have a voice recording with HD, there are more details to analyze," Pulver suggested.

Finally, a move to HD would usher in an "era" of end-to-end IP communications that would provide an underlying infrastructure for every service provider to have their own applications store akin to Apple's iPhone model.

In Pulver's vision, the HD Communications Summit (formerly the HD Voice Summit) will bring together stakeholders and try to find common ground for agreement. He said government may have a role and would like to get support for an initative to have HD voice on the PSTN by 2014, potentially by tying it into broadband efforts currently under way.

"If we sit on our hands and do nothing, we will never hear a better quality PSTN call. The... 300 to 3000 Hz phone should be history," said Pulver. "We should not stand for it anymore."