Here’s a quick quote from a friend of mine.  He stated this to me over Xbox Live’s chat function while we were in an online party together:

“Did you…………af…….where the g………..to ge………..m…….that?  Bullshit, man!”

That’s a good example of the chat quality one can expect from the average Xbox Live chat.  An update to the console later this year, however, may help the situation.

As part of the firmware update that will prep our Xboxes for Kinect, the codec and audio infrastructure that carries XBL chats will be upgraded, making chat quality significantly higher.  Xbox Live’s Jerry Johnson explained why the service is so shoddy to begin with, "The codec we used when we first launched was a low bit rate codec and we stuck with that.”  It seems that when Xbox Live’s chat functionality was being built, it was based on a 64K connection; a respectable speed in 2004, but terribly slow by today’s standards.

While broadband was required at service launch, it was a 64k connection and the chat service was tailored for that. Johnson notes that most won't think of that low a connection speed as broadband these days.  Johnson continued, "It's time for us to move on. Especially if we want to think about broadening - a crackly headset on the top of your head – not what people think of when they talk about popular entertainment."

This is some of the best news to come out of MS in a while.  While tweaks to Avatars and new dashboard displays are nice, improving the functionality so many of us use on a regular basis is way more important.  For a long time, I’ve been very unhappy with the quality of XBL’s voice chat, as I imagine many gamers have been.  Hopefully, this update will improve the service, elevating it from the digital equivalent of two cans and a string to a legitimate, reliable, perfectly audible system.