50% of consumers say they would change their telephone service provider to get better sound quality, according to Tom Lemaire, Sr. Director of Business Development at Orange/France Telecom North America, speaking at the CES HD Voice Summit this week (Orange/France Telecom has the largest deployment of HD Voice of any traditional telco). Rich Buchanan, Chief Marketing Officer at Ooma, said at the same session that his surveys show that 65% of consumers would change their provider to get better voice quality.
Bearing in mind that we know from observation that consumers value both mobility and price above call quality, these survey numbers fall into the “interesting if true” category.
Lemaire and Buchanan also said that their logs show that the average call in HD lasts longer than the average narrowband call, though they didn’t give numbers.