Vodacom partners to introduce ‘Super’ HD Voice

03 January 2019

Vodacom South Africa is partnering with device manufacturers to introduce Super High Definition (SHD) voice, also known as  HD Voice+, in a live commercial network. 

SHD is Voice Over LTE (VoLTE) subscribers using a compatible handset on the Vodacom network can now experience improved voice clarity made possible by the Enhanced Voice Services (EVS) codec.

Vodacom launched VoLTE three years ago and says it is now pioneering the evolution of this technology in South Africa with EVS being the successor of the current HD Voice codec called AMR-WB (adaptive multi-rate wideband).

EVS is designed to offer up to 20kHz of audio bandwidth, and is claimed to be able to deliver speech quality that matches hi-fi audio sources.

In addition, Vodacom says the codec has been shown to provide coverage gains for users at the network edge.

It says this will translate in better voice quality performance in conditions where cell coverage might not be optimal.

The company continues by saying that without EVS, VoLTE offers more than double the bandwidth available over 2G voice, and is similar to the 3G WB AMR codec (23.85).

But with the addition of EVS, bandwidth is again increased, further improving speech quality when using EVS-SWB (Super Wideband).