[Freeswitch-users] Skype as a path to wideband adoption

[Steve Underwood]

Hi all,

Consider the following:

    - FS has recently greatly enhanced its support for wide, wider and 
widest band telephony
    - That advantage is of no benefit when interworking with the PSTN
    - Skype has had wideband since day one, and just got 
super-ultra-duper-wideband.
    - FS is acquiring skype connectivity options (2, which hopefully 
will converge to one best in class option).

One obvious conclusion is Skype offers the best possibility for having 
broad coverage with wideband voice.
However, codec issues are certain to degrade quality. Lossy compressed 
codecs don't transcode well, and the
codecs Skype uses are their own. FS is gaining a range of open and 
royalty free licence wideband codecs, but
not the ones Skype uses. Skype choose widely supported narrowband codecs 
- G.711 and G.729 - but have not used a wideband codec with broad support.

So.... the point of this note is "what can we do to optimise things?"

Steve