HD Telephony by Artificial Bandwidth Extension

The audio bandwidth of digital landline and mobile telephone networks is still mostly restricted to 200 Hz to 3.4 kHz. This is due to compatibility requirements during the transition phase from analogue to digital transmission technology. The resulting characteristic “telephone speech” is widely accepted, but the intelligibility of syllables is only 91%. Meanwhile, improved coding standards for so-called “HD voice” or “Wideband Speech” have been developed which are gradually being introduced into the networks. They support an audio frequency bandwidth of 50 Hz to 7.0 kHz with significantly increased audio quality and speech intelligibility. For a very long time however, new HD-telephones and old narrowband telephones have to co-exist. If an HD-terminal is connected over a narrowband link to an old telephone, the improved coding scheme cannot be used.