A good friend of mine is in the Beta test for Microsoft's XBOX Live WAN gaming system. I was talking with the other gamers on a headset via the system- it's actually very cool. The sound quality was a tad worse than cellphones, with a bit of cutout at the beginning of a new phrase. But all of us could talk to each other at the same time and it very much enhanced the experience.
I haven't had a chance to try the competing system from Sony yet (how ironic ;) but I do know that Sony's platform will be broad AND narrow-band. Both are BYOB- bring your own bandwidth.
The obvious thought here is that Microsoft and Sony will soon both have international IP voice capabilities (edit. thanks to David Isenberg) built around their gaming consoles. In fact one of the promo movies that comes with XBOX Live shows a gamer asleep in bed (but with his headset on) woken up by friends demanding that he join the game that's going on.
It's a great idea. With open spectrum wireless, we'll be able to be to do wireless IP Telephony within the home via the consoles as well (just not via your 2.4G phone because that conflicts with 802.11b.)
Has anyone else seen this coming?
Will gaming consoles become "always-on" devices (not just used during gaming) due to the advent of the IP voice capabilities?
Just wanted to add that I was playing MotoGP while chatting with guys from TX, CA and Canada, while I was in NY. It's a whole new perspective on gaming and that experience, but I think the voice capabilities are going to be much more impactful than anything else. It may hasten the network aspects of those platforms if the price is right and the network (whatever it is that we call "broadband" here in the US) can support it.
Yup, I think there's a strong chance that consumer VoIP will diffuse up through the gaming link rather than top-down efforts. I've tried a number of VoIP applications to improve voice communications in my software development team, and, while none of them are good enough yet to displace the phone, TeamSpeak came closest by far.
The gaming industry understands two things that the rest of the computer world has a lot of problems with: pushing the performance envelope on cheap consumer hardware, and usability. One of the more significant technical challenges in VoIP is keeping latency down. Fortunately, this is already one of the top priorities for the game itself.
Usability, of course, is probably the number one reason why phone companies still exist other than as providers of high-quality IP connectivity.
Finally, as regards speech quality, it doesn't have to stay sub-cellphone for very long. The open-source Speex codec has very good quality, quite dramatically so in the "wideband" mode. When people find out they can have this, they will eat it up hungrily.