Communicating naturally — the opportunities of wideband coding

Abstract

Voice is one of the oldest telecommunications services and remains the most ubiquitous. Despite the longevity of voice services, and huge investment in development over many decades, the baseline characteristics of telecommunications speech have remained unchanged for many decades -namely, narrowband audio with a bandwidth of 300 Hz to 3.4 kHz. With an arguably mundane legacy one might question whether voice will ultimately lose out to other forms of so-called rich media.This paper shows that voice, enhanced by wideband coding technology is far from passé. Rather, voice continues to complement the other media types that augment it to offer the user a more natural communications experience.