According to Microsoft’s Jerry Johnson, the voice chat feature on Xbox LIVE will be getting an upgrade later this year. As reported on Kotaku, Johnson explains “We launched and we said we required broadband. We required a 64k connection, which not many people think of as broadband any longer. But that was the minimum requirement to run the service at the time.”

Times have changed since the launch of XBL and MS feels it’s time to upgrade to a higher bit rate codec for the voice chat. While I think the current codec is certainly adequate, I definitely won’t mind the update; watch for it this November.