XConnect announced a new transcoding technology designed to promote wider adoption and utilization of high-definition (HD) voice services.
The new feature for members of XConnect’s HD Alliance delivers clearer, higher-quality and more effective voice communications by enabling fixed-line and mobile operators to seamlessly exchange HD voice traffic through an IP-peering federation for the first time.
“We are solving the key challenge to widespread adoption of high-definition voice services: the need to deliver traffic across disparate networks,” said XConnect CEO Eli Katz. “The enhancement to XConnect’s HD Alliance extends the benefits of cross-network HD voice service to mobile operators via cloud-based transcoding, thereby enabling fixed operators to connect HD voice calls with mobile endpoints and vice versa.”
Katz noted that the new transcoding feature will be increasingly useful as HD voice gains traction across all networks – fixed, mobile and over the top offerings – for consumer and enterprise markets.
To date, technology barriers have stood in the way of HD voice communication between fixed-line and mobile operators, which deploy different codecs. The new feature bridges the disparate HD “islands” by enabling transcoding in the XConnect multimedia interconnection hub.