Skype lets you do audio conferencing with wideband codecs, and a service called Vapps High Definition Conferencing does the same thing for non-Skype VoIP calls.

Now other VoIP providers can offer wideband conferencing too. A company called Wyde Voice sells an all-IP conferencing platform that natively uses wideband codecs. The Wyde platform uses the iSAC codec from GIPS, so anybody calling in from a soft phone like the Gismo5 client, or the Google, AOL or Yahoo VoIP clients can enjoy a conference in wideband. If one of the participants in the call is using a narrow-band codec, the Wyde device up-samples the signal to wideband quality for mixing.

I have always been an enthusiastic proponent of wideband audio – it is one of the major potential advantages of VoIP over circuit switched telephony. Circuit switched calls are encoded with G.711, which yields 12 bits of effective dynamic range and a maximum frequency of about 3.5KHz. Human speech has harmonics even above 10KHz, which is why it is hard to tell the difference between and “F” and an “S” over the phone. The G.711 codec places an absolute limit on the sound quality of a regular phone call. A VoIP phone call can use a wideband codec, with whatever dynamic range and frequency range you want. There are several of them, commonly with a sample size of 16 bits and a sampling rate of 16KHz which captures a maximum audio frequency of 8KHz. When you have a good enough connection Skype uses a wideband codec by default, which is why it can sound better than “toll quality” (if you aren’t limited by your loudspeaker and microphone.)

Unfortunately, for the non-Skype world there’s a chicken and egg problem – almost no phones support wideband codecs, so the carriers aren’t motivated to support them either. Worse, any VoIP call that traverses the PSTN at any point is converted to G.711, losing the wideband frequencies. Worse yet, to cut costs most carrier implementations of VoIP use a bandwidth-saving codec that intrinsically delivers inferior sound quality to G.711; for example, last I heard Vonage was using G.729A.

As VoIP matures, and more and more calls are IP end-to-end through VoIP peering and ENUM arrangements (what Gizmo5 calls “back-door dialing,”) wideband codecs will become more pervasive and our conversations will become clearer. The Wyde announcement is a step towards that world.

Sony has added Skype to the PSP. The Sony CES website says:

Call friends, talk trash to fellow gamers or catch up with acquaintances via Skype for PSP system.

PC Magazine says that the PSP supports both SkypeIn and SkypeOut, so the PSP can substitute for a phone when you are at home or somewhere else where you have Wi-Fi access.

This isn’t a breakthrough, just another feather in the scale, tipping us towards a world where just about any connected device can make an internet phone call. The speed of this evolution is governed by the enormous legacy public telephone network; because of Metcalfe’s law anything that aspires to be a useful substitute for the phone system must first interoperate with it.

The Open Handset Alliance was announced today by Google and 30 or so other companies. Until now the highest-profile open source handset operating environment was OpenMoko.

The list of participants has no real surprises in it. Nokia isn’t on the list, most likely because this project competes head on with Symbian. This may also help to explain why Sony Ericsson isn’t a supporter yet, either. But the other three of the top five handset manufacturers are members: Motorola, Samsung and LG. All of these ship Symbian-based phones, but they also ship Windows based phones, so they are already pursuing an OS-agnostic strategy. Open standards are less helpful to a market leader than to its competitors.

Of course the other leading smartphone OS vendors are also missing from the list: Microsoft, Apple, Palm and RIM.

Ebay is there because this massively benefits Skype.

Silicon vendors retain more control of their destiny when there is a competitive software community, so it makes sense that TI is aboard even though it is the market leader in cellphone chips. Intel is another chip vendor that is a member. Intel can normally be relied on to support this type of open platform initiative, and although Intel sold its handset-related businesses in 2006, its low power CPU efforts may evolve from ultra-mobile PCs down to smartphones in a few years.

Among MNOs Verizon and AT&T Mobile are notorious for their walled-garden policies, so it makes sense that they aren’t on the list, though Sprint and T-Mobile are, which is an encouraging indication.

At the launch of the iPhone Steve Jobs said that the reason there would be no SDK for the iPhone was that AT&T didn’t want their network brought down by a rogue application. I ridiculed this excuse in an Internet Telephony column. Even so, the carriers do have a valid objection to completely open platforms: their subscribers will call them for support when the phone crashes. For this reason, applications that use sensitive APIs in Symbian must be “Symbian signed.” When he announced the iPhone SDK, Steve Jobs alluded to this as a model that Apple may follow.

So Sprint’s and T-Mobile’s participation in this initiative is very interesting. Sprint’s press release says:

Unlike other wireless carriers, Sprint allows data users to freely browse the Internet outside its portal and has done so since first offering access to the Internet on its phones in 2001.

Open Internet access is actually available from all the major US MNOs other than Verizon; AT&T ships the best handset for this, the iPhone. But the iPhone doesn’t (officially) let users load whatever software they want onto the phone. Symbian and Windows-based phones generally do, and again all the major MNOs ship handsets based on these operating systems. An open source handset goes a big step further, but who benefits depends on what parts of the source code are published, and what APIs are exposed by the proprietary parts of the system. As a rule of thumb, one would think that giving developers this greater degree of control over the system will increase their scope for innovation.

I am at the VoIP Developer Conference in Santa Clara today and tomorrow. Paul Amery, the man behind Skype’s developer outreach program gave a relaxed and engaging talk on Wednesday morning. He gave some numbers and some advice to developers.

First, the numbers: there are now almost 200 million registered users of Skype. 30% of Skype users use it for business calls. In December 2006 Skype 3.0 started putting add-in programs right in the menu of the on-screen phone rather than leaving them in a “back end gallery” on the website. Downloads of “Skype Extras” went from 25 thousand a month to 3 million a month as a result of this change. The most popular download is Crazy Talk, a lip syncing avatar that you can use in video calls even if you don’t have a camera. It has been downloaded 4.5 million times since December. Gizmos Talking Heads is another top ten avatar. 30% of the downloads are games. When Skype sells one of your Extras you get 60% of the revenue.

Another number from Paul was that there are tens of thousands of third party developers building Extras. Clearly to succeed you have to stand out from the pack. Paul had a simple recipe for this: keep your software simple. What sells is what users can figure out in less than 10 seconds. This is so true; look at the revenues being made from ringtones.