On Monday at the VentureBeat Mobile Summit in California, AT&T Senior Vice President Kris Rinne reported that the carrier would activate HD Voice on its network later in 2013, calling it “part of our voice over LTE strategy.” Also in the interview, the executive called previous call quality issues “off the table,” and mostly resolved.
The feature was revealed at the iPhone 5 announcement, and implemented in March by T-Mobile as part of its iPhone 5 rollout. The technology requires both network and device support. The iPhone 5 that AT&T carries does have support for the feature, calling it Wideband Audio, but it is currently not enabled on the network.
Rinne also noted that “advanced LTE” was in progress at the network, adding interference reduction improvements, and other improvements. Furthermore, Rinne claims that competing services such as messaging services from Facebook and Apple’s iMessage were welcome on the AT&T network, and that extensive developer support exists for the features.
