People don’t pay for HiDef voice

August 4th, 2009

Seth Godin asks if he’s the only one who’d pay for HiDefenition voice. Normally I love what Seth writes but in this case, the answer to the question is pretty much yes – virtually no-one wants to pay for good quality telephone calls.
Say what you will about the phone company but AT&T and BT have a wealth of understanding about how to make telephone calls sound good. The theory is well understood and any voice codec comes with a standardised score which will tell you in advance how good it will sound. Today BT will sell you a very high quality VoIP service – problem is no-one wants to pay for it. Consumers have voted with their wallets and they’ve said no.
I sit in meetings every month where very smart engineers talk about how to design the network to support great voice products, all the while taking calls on their mobile phones which sound like you’re talking from the bottom of a well. GSM defines high quality voice codecs for 3G – no mobile company has every succeeded in selling these.
There are many cases where people pay for quality but usually it’s because the standard offering is pretty awful. But though we remember lots of bad quality phone calls, most of the time it’s perfectly adequate. Voice just isn’t that bad today.

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