iNum Introduces HD Voice Calling to Skype

Posted 10/27/2009 at 12:04pm | by Bart Salisbury

2

Comments

Print

Thinking of going global? It just got a little easier. Voxbone, a Bussells-based provider of international VoIP origination services and telephone numbers will announce tomorrow its global phone number service, iNum, will support high-definition voice calling among VoIP networks, including Skype.

A global phone number is like one assigned by Google Voice: yours to keep wherever you choose to wander. Global numbers came into being when the International Telephone Union (ITU) created the 883 code, which refers to the Internet rather than a country. When the 883 code is used Voxbone gets your call, routes it to the nearest Internet Service Provider (ISP), then disconnects itself so you can use the lower cost service.

The quality of your call depends on the codec used. Skype uses the SILK super wideband audio codec. Voxbone will instead use the HD wideband codec G.722. Voxbone will provide the necessary transcoding. And it plans to offer transcoding for additional codecs in the future.

How big a deal this is depends on who you ask. Robin Wauters of TechCrunch writes: “We should note there is some industry criticism around the concept of ‘HD calling’, which at times gets billed as a fancy new term that doesn’t describe anything earth-shatteringly new or innovative and something which there is no demand for.”

Image Credit: Voxbone, Hans Jørn Storgaard Andersen/Wikipedia Commons