HD capability uses digital audio to improve both voice calls and faxes made over Inmarsat Swift Broadband®
Ottawa, Canada – May 17, 2011 —TrueNorth Avionics, the fast-growing developer of executive airborne telecom solutions, has introduced HD Voice (HDV), an enhancement to its advanced Simphone¯ OpenCabin® system that provides a significant quality improvement over other phone systems on calls made via the Inmarsat Swift Broadband and Swift64 Satcom links. Delivering crystal clear voice fidelity with less delay, TrueNorth’s digital HD Voice — another industry first from TrueNorth — also offers more robust and reliable faxing over Inmarsat Swift Broadband. The Airbus Corporate Jet Centre is the launch customer for HD Voice aboard its series of A319CJ aircraft, followed by a B777 business aircraft installation performed by AMAC. HD Voice can also be retrofitted to existing Simphone¯ OpenCabin systems, with no additional hardware units required.
“We have heard from our customers that high quality voice calls are important to them, so we developed this breakthrough voice application using digital audio to provide them with crystal clear, low-latency calling. We call this ‘HD Voice’ because voice calls are so good they’re virtually the quality of digital broadcast audio,” said Mark van Berkel, TrueNorth’s president.
The Simphone¯ OpenCabin system uses a suite of enterprise-level software applications (‘apps’) to add functionality and growth. Where current hardware-centric systems are heavy, expensive to install, complex and prone to obsolescence, Simphone¯ OpenCabin turns a business aircraft into an extension of a company’s corporate IT and telecom networks. Benefits include robust, ‘office-in-the-sky’ performance; an unlimited lifespan; significant lifecycle cost savings, since hardware needs to be installed only once; and the ability to add a wide variety of custom functions by simply uploading software.
'Future–proofing' the IFE installation means providing an onboard network with sufficient bandwidth that the airline will never have to tear apart their airplane to re-wire to install upgrades. Fiber-to-the-Seat™ provides a fiber optics network running at a gigabit per second – High-definition video is only the beginning – who knows what the hot, killer apps will be 10-20 years from now?!”