France Telecom has already deployed mobile HD in France and will be rolling out mobile HD service in Belgium and the UK later [...]]]>

HD voice quality on a cell phone? Don’t laugh, the combination of VoIP and broadband might bring high quality voice calls to mobile handsets a lot faster than you might think.

France Telecom has already deployed mobile HD in France and will be rolling out mobile HD service in Belgium and the UK later this year.  A number of handset manufacturers announced HD capable handsets in Barcelona earlier this year, including Nokia and Sony Ericsson.

Even mobile VoIP player TruPhone says it is ready for HD.  CTO Ed Guy said the company has HD in the lab and is prepared to roll HD support when the time is right.

Qualcomm touted its HD demonstrations in North America, with field trials in its hometown of San Diego and a demo at CTIA.  The company used Digium Asterisk as a transcoding platform to move calls between between its 4GV-WB codec and industry standard G.722, with calls moved over EVDO Rev A. The presentation also included a swipe at how EVDO Rev A/B is more efficient than LTE when it come to VoIP transport.