I’ve been seeing a lot about the advent of HD voice in the business environment. Over the next three to five years we should see the wholesale adoption of HD compatible devices throughout the network. So what’s the big deal? Try it…..that’s all I can say. What a difference. You’ll wonder how you ever understood the person on the other end of the phone without it.

Many of the top VoIP PBX / Phone manufacturers are already adding, or planning on adding, wideband to their IP phones thereby allowing HD transmission. That means that very soon all internal calls within an organization will b e HD. For multi site clients the same rings true (no pun intended) – HD will be used throughout the entire network.

In addition to that, and I think much more exciting, is the increased opportunity to integrate your cell phone / PDA into your internal system via Wi-Fi connectivity. Most PDA manufacturers are installing the Wi-Fi option these days and it is a great way to connect to the internal system as an extension. Once connected they can receive HD calls – as long as the PDA they are using is equipped for it. This is awesome……I’m telling you it won’t be long before the desk telephone disappears and is replaced by the wireless PDA.

The final piece of the puzzle in providing the HD voice call will be the interconnection of all the related players i.e. the carriers playing nice together. You have to be able to deliver the HD call end to end without thinking about it and we’re almost there now.

Just like the switch to HD television this will start to take off as more people hear the difference in call quality.