Re: [codec] #16: Multicast?

["Raymond (Juin-Hwey) Chen" <[e-mail]>]

Hi Koen,

>> I wouldn't be surprised if the total VoIP users worldwide exceed 100M,
>> probably significantly.

> Correct, Skype alone has > 100M active users...

[Raymond]: I knew Skype has hundreds of millions of subscribers. My 
comment above was specifically referring to the non-computer-based 
VoIP subscribers where a physical telephone set is involved in a 
VoIP phone call.  Sorry for not making it clear.

>> Most of these are still narrowband.

> No: super-wideband.

[Raymond]: See my comment above.  For those VoIP phone calls that 
involve at least a physical telephone set, most of them are still 
narrowband calls today.  I trust that what you said (super-wideband) 
must be correct for computer-to-computer calls since Skype dominates 
that market there and you know that market better than I do, but I 
am talking about something totally different here.

> Are IP phones that come on the market today still using only  
> narrowband?  That must be a quickly reducing segment, no?

[Raymond]: Many enterprise IP phones shipped today indeed have 
wideband (16 kHz) capabilities. However, a lot of enterprises may 
still configure them to do only narrowband calls.  Even if some 
enterprises do enable wideband calls on these phones, wideband calls 
are typically only available for IP-phone-to-IP-phone calls between 
IP phones in their own corporate network.  The moment an employee 
dial out of the corporate network, it's essentially all narrowband.  

There are some wideband cell phone trials in Europe.  However, when 
I spoke to a veteran in the cell phone industry, his assessment was 
that the up-take on wideband cell phones would be pretty slow, and 
the narrowband cell phones would be here to stay for a VERY, VERY 
long time.  He said even today we still have to support the very 
first digital cellular standard codec, the 13 kb/s GSM Full-Rate 
codec, about 20 years after it came out.  His point was that 
narrowband cell phones would not go away for a long, long time.  I 
guess similar things can be said for narrowband land-line 
telephones.

> I do agree that "we shouldn't completely ignore narrowband."

[Raymond]: Glad that we have an agreement here :o)
Have a good weekend.