Bharti Airtel has launched high quality voice service for its subscribers in Kenya, Rwanda, Malawi and Nigeria in the African sub-continent.
“Airtel becomes the third operator to launch a mobile HD voice service in Africa. Further launches will be scheduled in 2013,” the company said in a statement today.
With HD voice, customers can talk normally and be heard clearly, without having to raise their voice, even in noisier environments.
“Surveys confirm that customers place a high value on HD voice,” Airtel Africa Chief Marketing Officer Andre Beyers said, adding, “the new service will enrich end-user experience for Airtel subscribers’’.
Mobile HD voice enables high quality voice calls because it reduces the background noise often heard on a regular call.
It is based on AMR (Adaptive Multi Rate) wideband technology (W-AMR) which operates with nine different bit rates, providing high quality voice calls.
Compared to the current narrow-band speech codec device, the W-AMR speech-compression algorithm doubles voice bandwidth and produces better results.