A Half-Full Glass of HD Voice from Mobile World Congress - And Getting Fuller

HD voice enthusiasts might be a bit let down after Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week -- but they shouldn't. While France Telecom (News - Alert) was feted for its ground-breaking work in introducing HD voice service to the mobile community and for its roadmap to deploy mobile HD voice service across Europe, other carriers took a pass on formally announcing their plans.

The biggest HD voice news out of Barcelona was France Telecom Orange's announcement that it would launch mobile HD voice service in France, Luxembourg and Spain in 2010, adding to a deployment list that already includes Moldova, the UK, and Belgium. A three month service trial in the UK will officially start in April, an event that no doubt had 3 UK conducting their own ad hoc mobile HD voice demo for select media and analysts in late January.

Seeing Spain on Orange's mobile HD voice deployment was no great surprise, since France Telecom and Ericsson had already provisioned HD voice service across the city of Barcelona for the duration of Mobile World Congress and Ericsson had previously conducted consumer market research in Spain on the appeal of HD voice services.

In addition, France Telecom says it plans to offer eight handsets supporting HD voice by the first half of 2010 -- and expects to have all of its handsets to support HD voice by the end of 2011.

In Moldova, Nokia (News - Alert) is supplying one mobile HD voice handset and Sony Ericsson pronounced two of its GreenHeart handsets 'HD voice ready' at the end of 2009, so there's at least two vendors who have already publically lined up to support the AMR-WB mobile HD voice codec.

However, Orange also offers phones from Alcatel, Blackberry, HTC, LG, Motorola, and Samsung (News - Alert); which of those vendors will be in the mobile HD lineup later this year? My bets would be on HTC, LG, and Samsung. HTC is known for having 'Hot' Android phones and with D2 Technologies (News - Alert) announcing the incorporation of wideband codec support into its Android software stack earlier this week, this is an easy bet.

At CES last month, a senior LG executive got quiet and starting picking his words very carefully when I asked him if the company would support AMR-WB -- since LG has 8 phones in the Orange portfolio, I'd say it's likely.

Finally, Samsung has 14 phones in the Orange lineup -- the largest selection by far; so I'd expect at least one from the Korean manufacturer.

Needless to say, with France Telecom rolling out mobile HD voice across Europe, there's plenty of opportunity for telecommunications equipment manufacturers such as Aculab (News - Alert) and Dialogic, along with software solutions providers ranging from CommuniGate to WYDEvoice.

The disappointing note out of MWC was the lack of other carriers making mobile HD voice announcements. In January, 3 UK had hinted to the media that there would be a number of carriers introducing about a mobile HD voice call exchange/federation, but there's been not a word. Be interesting to see if there's further news in the weeks to come.