Orange UK made an announcement about crystal clear mobile voice calls via High Definition (HD) Voice back in January. Interestingly, Orange have already launched High Definition (HD) Voice in Moldova which was a world first for Orange. Now, High Definition (HD) Voice will launch on Orange later this year after full trials have been conducted.

High Definition (HD) Voice offers crystal clear mobile voice calls and is unaffected by distance. So a mobile call from Glasgow to London will be as good as a call from someone 5 feet away from you. To prove it’s ready to roll out across the UK, Orange will conduct a full trial. The video above gives a clear intro to High Definition (HD) Voice.

The trial which starts immediately is running across Orange’s 3G network which covers the span of Bristol, Reading and Southampton. A wide selection of trialists from both business and mainstream users will judge High Definition (HD) Voice in terms of voice call quality and usability.

HD Voice offers an improvement in the sound quality of traditional mobile voice calls due to a wider speech bandwidth of 50–7000 Hz compared to the current narrowband speech codec of 300–3400 Hz. HD Voice uses the WB-AMR (Wideband Adaptive Multi-Rate) speech codec to deliver significantly enhanced sound quality while utilising the same network resources.