T-Mobile & Ericsson trial to improve GSM Voice quality in Germany

Improving GSM Voice Call Quality

Ericsson and T-Mobile International say that they have successfully trialed AMR-Wideband among consumers in Germany, proving the potential of this technology thanks to a significant improvement in voice quality and the consequent end-user satisfaction. This was the first AMR (Adaptive Multi Rate) Wideband trial in a commercial network and consumer response was researched by the Ericsson Consumer & Enterprise Lab together with the German market research company GfK.

The report shows clearly the positive reaction of the consumers, with more than 70% of the participants experiencing significant improvement in the voice quality.

Klaus-Juergen Krath, Vice President RAN Engineering, T-Mobile International, says: "TMO is absolutely committed to constantly improving the user experience for our customers and AMR Wideband offers a voice quality as yet unknown in telephony. The early customer trial delivers valuable feedback, which can be used in a future implementation phase."

Ericsson AMR Wideband is a new GSM/WCDMA standardized speech codec designed to enhance voice quality and clarity in mobile networks to noticeably higher levels than today's ISDN fixed telephony, even in whispered conversations or environments with high background noise.

AMR-Wideband is the latest speech-compression standard algorithm and offers substantially better voice quality because of doubled voice bandwidth without extra radio and transmission requirements.

The trial was run for four weeks, earlier this summer, with 150 consumers involved in Cologne and Hamburg.


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