Dan Berninger making it happen. “All major operators offer HD voice to at least a segment of direct customer,” Dan writes, ”But there remains no interoperability across operators.” More than a decade ago, Dan, Jeff Pulver and friends convinced everyone in  the industry HD voice made phone calls much better.

Broadband allows doubling the frequency range and better codecs improve everything. The additional cost is trivial, something like ten cents/month all in for better mics and network gateways. The gear is so cheap that many phones the last two years include HD. Carriers included Telstra in Australia are turning it on.

The bottleneck: no one carrier could make HD effective. Both ends of the call need to be HD and most calls go from one network to another.

HD dies from lack of interoperability. Time and again industry efforts have failed.

Time Warner and Sprint wanted to move ahead seven years ago; Tony Werner of Comcast four years ago committed to HD voice. http://bit.ly/HDtonyw.  Advanced codecs are built into most cable gateway chips.  “I Want My HD Voice,” everyone cried after hearing the Global  IP Sound demos at VON.

Dan Berninger is “Convening a HD voice reunion for friends attending CES 2015 on January 6th at 6:00 PM. The event will feature the great grandson of Alexander Graham Bell making a ceremonial ‘first call’ (the golden spike) on the HD network (HDN). ... The event kicks-off an interoperability push as the last and critical step for the HDN to replace the PSTN.”

FCC Commissioners Mike O’Rielly, Mignon Clyburn, Ajit Pai and Tom Wheeler will be at CES. I hope they - and you - go to vcxc.org/hdvoice.html for free registration.