With the addition of France, Spain and Luxembourg to its 2010 roadmap, Orange is today ramping up its planned roll-out of mobile HD voice services in Europe. Mobile HD voice is the second critical strand in Orange's HD voice strategy, building on from the highly successful delivery of HD voice services for VOIP in 2006. Orange, following technological developments, has confirmed that its UK customer trial of mobile HD voice will start from Spring and run for three months.

In September 2009, Orange became the world's first operator to commercially launch a mobile HD voice service in Moldova, announcing plans to bring mobile HD voice to the UK and Belgium in 2010. In addition to mobile HD voice, Orange was also the first operator to launch HD over VOIP, first in France and shortly to be rolled out to Poland and Spain.

Senior executive vice president for Orange's global mobile business, Olaf Swantee, said: "As far as Orange is concerned, voice is not just a commodity. With mobile HD voice, we are delivering true customer innovation - one that will genuinely enrich and transform our customers' lives. By being the first to innovate and deliver a new mobile voice experience, we provide a compelling and differentiated proposition which sets Orange apart. High-definition voice is the future standard for mobile communication."

Orange plans to rapidly extend the range of HD voice-compatible mobile handsets across Europe. Pricing and handsets will be announced at the time of launch locally.

HD Voice provides excellent audio quality due to a wider speech bandwidth of 50-7000 Hz compared to the current narrowband speech codec of 300-3400 Hz as it uses the AMR-WB (Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband) speech codec. The AMR-WB delivers significantly enhanced sound quality whilst utilizing the same network resources.