Jeff Pulver was a guest speaker yesterday at a dinner event hosted by Ditech Communications, a major sponsor of Spring VON.  Ditech delivers echo cancellation and voice processing products used by wireline, wireless and VoIP service providers. 

One of the highlights of his speech was his lobbying for a wider adoption of wideband CODECs in the VoIP world.  The impressive uptake of IP phones and the imminent roll out of 3G wireless handsets have both generated a substantial opportunity to deliver better than toll-quality audio performance in the new packet-based telephone network.

This better than toll-quality sound can be obtained by using the capabilities of the data network that is not limited to 8-KHz sampling rate (about a 4-KHz pass-band) present in the existing telephone network.  Jeff's point is valid, since inexpensive DSPs can compress wide bandwidth signals for transmission over the packet network, and a slightly bigger bandwidth consumption should no longer be a major issue.  If I were a VoIP marketer, I would love to play side-by-side two clips: one with G.711 and one with G.722, and then explain that the first clip was legacy wireline sound, whereas the second really captures the essence of VoIP - being able to deliver a much better sound quality.