JeeBee,

Try to keep things in perspective. They are trying to raise the quality of phone calls to something like a poor AM radio. Nothing more. Wideband has been part of the UMTS spec since day 1, but its only recently that operators have started to take an interest. Sadly, this seems to mean very few phones in the field have support for it. The UMTS chipsets all support the 16k/s sampling rate required, but the codec (AMR-WB) and other bits don't seem to be there.

I demand a perfect 32-bit audio, stereo, 192kHz stream! Even though I will be listening through a 1cm diameter speaker in my phone, and sampling it through a tiny tiny microphone, I need such a quality audio, just because! Right!

I presume improvements in compression technology will allow this HD mobile voice codec to run in nearly the same amount of bandwidth as the existing system.

What phones support this anyway?