Voice Quality Feature

Orange (France Telecom (News - Alert)) has been a bit circumspect when announcing new territories for mobile HD voice services. It shouldn't be surprising since SFR has announced it too will introduce mobile HD voice service in France this fall, placing it in a race of sorts as to which mobile carrier will be able to claim first place in HD voice users in that nation.

In mid-June, SFR announced it was running a HD voice trial this summer with Nokia handsets and the service provider -- 56 percent owned by Vivendi and 44 percent by Vodafone (News - Alert) -- said it expected to put the service in operation this fall. Since SFR has around 20.4 million mobile customers (2009 numbers) and bills itself as "France's leading alternative telecommunications operator," it will be interesting to see how SFR and Orange (News - Alert) square off in the months to come.

At Mobile World Congress (MWC), Orange officially announced it would launch mobile HD voice in France; unofficially, a PowerPoint slide detailing the move slipped out at CES (News - Alert) in January.   In a later release, Orange said it would be supporting HD voice by the end of July and various consumer trials are taking place now for users with the appropriate Nokia (News - Alert) handsets supporting the AMR-WB codec.

But the HD voice rollout in France isn't the only little surprise that Orange has kept to itself. Last month, Orange launched HD voice service in Armenia -- a country that wasn't even on the list of HD voice territories released at MWC. However, it shouldn't be a total surprise since the first Orange territory to get HD voice was Moldova. 

What other cards might Orange have stashed away? It's hard to say, given that France Telecom has a customer base of nearly 133 million customers around the world in 32 countries. Currently, trials are underway in the UK with service expected to be generally available "later this summer." At MWC, Orange added Luxembourg and Spain to the 2010 list; Belgium was already on. 

If you're looking at Europe, Austria, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, and Switzerland haven't made the list for 2010, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least one of those countries just had the switch "flipped" without a dramatic build up, just like in Armenia.    Tunisia looks to be a good bet for the first mobile HD service in Africa and the Middle East since it is a new build for Orange -- like Moldova and Armenia -- with a 500 million euro investment in a "high-quality... 3G+" network.

The other side to the coin is figuring out what carriers will match Orange in delivering mobile HD voice service. Vodafone's minority stake in SFR would indicate that other Vodafone companies across Europe might follow.   There's also talk that at least one of the Nordic trio of Finland, Sweden, and Norway will see mobile HD voice service soon.