IT EXPO West - Polycom CTO on the HD Voice opportunity

Polycom CTO and co-founder Jeff Rodman thinks HD Voice is ready for its moment, despite claims by some that the technology may be suffering from a bad case of the hypes. He said in an interview that half of the frequency spectrum of human voice is cut out by POTS and narrowband IP voice codecs, resulting in the loss of "the edges of words and syllables" in conversations.

Rodman said HD Voice technology has the capacity to restore the part of the conversations that currently are lost. He also said the cost of provisioning desk phones, conference phones and other telephony end points has decreased to the point where Polycom can deploy HD technology in all its devices.

"It went into our top end phones in 2005, and here we are having rolled it into the entire line," Rodman said. "The argument is not on cost anymore. It used to cost a fair number of dollars to make a product wideband capable, but now it's less than a dollar, and that's the reason that Polycom has been able to penetrate our entire product line from top to bottom."

Rodman said he was not really concerned about the threat to Polycom's core handset business potentially posed by mobile VoIP offerings or softclients. He said the company really wants everyone to add HD Voice and has always been a strong supporter of standard protocols, in hopes that HD Voice would gain widespread adoption. Rodman remains adamant about the actual value to enterprise deployments of HD Voice technology.

"Speech itself is wideband, and to the extent that the phone you're using cuts out three fourths of your communication, you're exhausting yourself," Rodman said. "Whether you're talking to your internal people, or talking to your vendors, it's important. Let your competitors call your vendors on an HD phone with wideband capabilities and you continue to contact them with standard telephony. See how they perceive your company."

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