XConnect announces a strong representation of the U.S. VoIP service providers offering HD voice service are participating in a trial of the world’s first IP-peering federation created for exchanging HD voice traffic.

Alteva, Broadvox, Ooma, Phone.com, SimpleSignal, Stage 2 Networks, Telesphere, TurboBridge and ZipDX are taking part in XConnect’s trial, launched April 1.

The trial is designed for the exchange of high-definition calls between networks using XConnect’s secure and scalable carrier ENUM-based interconnection services.

Fixed, mobile and Web 2.0 service providers increasingly are adopting HD voice because it enables superior-quality voice communications compared with those supported by the legacy PSTN. HD voice reproduces human speech with substantially greater clarity, depth and nuance, using codecs that capture more than double the frequency range of traditional circuit-switched calls while generally requiring less bandwidth. The rich, natural-sounding quality of HD voice calls often is likened to that of face-to-face conversations.

However, most HD voice service today is available only within a given operator’s network. Global utilisation of HD voice will require cross-network calling, with the entire call path and all endpoints supporting the rich features. XConnect established the HD federation to meet this need.

Operators joining the trial will participate in a peering community, called the HD Alliance, within XConnect’s Global Alliance, which combines carrier ENUM-registry and multimedia IP interconnection hub services.

The Global Alliance enables members to deliver advanced IP services across networks, as well as decrease costs and increase service quality. In addition to reducing termination costs, service providers are spared the considerable time and resource allocations of establishing and maintaining separate interconnection agreements with each of numerous providers. End-to-end IP interconnection also allows for higher call quality than the PSTN can support, as well as multimedia features.