The article makes a great point early on: hearing voices over VOIP is markedly different than over analog phone lines. The robotic voice and the weird compression when your connection isn't good are common for me. Worst of all is the 0.5-1 second delay I still sometimes hear, on local calls no less!
If the same call was being had over a phone line and we were in the same country, the audio fidelity would be excellent.
The key word there being analog phone lines. Cell phone lines, which account for 99.99999% of all phone communication these days, are IMO worse than VOIP for sound quality (though better at latency). It's weird that kids growing up in the post-landline era will never realize how clear and amazingly low-latency phone calls used to be. If two people were seated across a table talking on a landline, they'd hear the signal from the phone before they heard it over the air.
No, the key words are uncompressed and non-packetized. The best telephone voice quality ever was ISDN from handset to handset. Digital end to end, 64Kb/s without compression, and rigidly clocked at the bit level. No noise. No jitter. Switzerland had ISDN to the home for years. Also, in Europe, there was power over ISDN, so the phone didn't need AC power or batteries.
A friend there was annoyed when they forced him to convert to inferior VoIP, which, even over fiber, is worse.
In Ireland, until _weirdly recently_, after ISDN had died out for pretty much all other purposes, every government minister got an ISDN phone installed in their house, to make them easier to interview in the radio.
Low-latency for local calls, yes. High quality sound, also yes.
But for long distance, no thank you. I will not go back to the 90s just for that one reason alone. It was hellish calling across the Atlantic. Like 15 cents a minute with a 1.5 (sometimes 2) second delay between speaking. And having to remember the dialling sequences and complexity around looking up foreign phone numbers, both of which are now just built into the cell phone.
Or having to trudge around in the rain for a phone booth and having to page through a worn out phone book just to make some dinner reservations. Yuck. I'll take the bluetooth shenanigans, thank you.
Or having to trudge around in the rain for a phone booth and having to page through a worn out phone book just to make some dinner reservations. Yuck.
Pretending like this was the only way to make a dinner reservation reminds me of the juice loosener informercial from the Simpsons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viejY6UZ5Bk
I didn't pretend it was the only way, I was saying that there are times when one is out and needs to make reservations or call the wife that went into labour or call work after a car broke down. These were actual, real things people did back then. Thankfully I'm young enough to only have had to do it for a couple of years, but I do not have Merry England syndrome around what phones were like in the mid nineties.
In the 90ies I used 'calling cards' to 'dial in' to Frankfurt, and then via touch tone entry of the real number to Florida. Interestingly that wasn't only ridiculously cheap, but much better quality than dialed directly via my native Telco/ISP. Also no latency, sounded almost as good as native ISDN.
VoLTE with fancy compression didn't make audio quality better, it just freed up bandwidth for carriers to cram more channels in. This has repeated for every single "improvement" in VoIP technology over its ~40 year history, the tradeoff always goes in the direction of making more money instead of offering better service.
If you're calling within the same carrier with "HD voice", AMR-WB at 12.65kbps scores a higher MOS than old-school G.711 64kbps PCM (and is more pleasing in some ways that the MOS doesn't capture).
Sure, if they'd just give us another couple dang kilobits/second it'd be way better still, but...
At this point, the bandwidth used for voice is pretty much irrelevant from a cellular capacity planning point of view-- people use >5GB/month on average and 24/7 12kbps calling is less than 5GB/month.
> VoLTE with fancy compression didn't make audio quality better, it just freed up bandwidth for carriers to cram more channels in.
Not just that, it’s also used for additional carrier lock-in!
(In Canada, carriers were barred from selling carrier-locked phones some years ago, but since VoLTE, they don’t support VoLTE functionality on any phones that haven’t been certified for use on their network, which is limited, in practice, to phone models that they sell themselves. Normally this means you fallback to 3G for calling, unless you happen to be roaming with a carrier/country where 3G service has been dropped, in which case you simply don’t get any voice service.)
It's wild when I'm talking to family on Signal, which seems to run high quality VoIP even on a non-VoLTE-capable phone. (and the hardware seems to be VoLTE-capable, just Sprint never released the appropriate modem firmware _in my market_, and I've been unsuccessful at hacking apart a rom from india...)
But as nice as the quality may be, the latency still sucks. It's just the nature of the beast.
I have to agree. People forget how many frequencies made it through the Bell System and the wire lines. Maybe long ago it was 100% analog, but somewhere along the way they started adding in digital compression and that usually meant stripping out all but the most important frequencies. There were several decades when a dial phone to dial phone call produced pretty horrible accoustics.
Clarity and latency are at odds here. Digital can, with enough bitrate, encode more clarity than your ear can hear. Radio stations use two-channel ISDN for remote studio links so it sounds like the interviewer and interviewee are in the same room, sometimes you'd never know they aren't unless they announce it.
But ISDN is all but gone, and all other digital voice systems are packetized and suffer awful, terrible, excruciating, reflex-fumbling latency. No matter how clear they are, I'm forever tripping on — no you go — okay as I was — go ahead — um okay — aaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
> ISDN-BRI never gained popularity as a general use telephone access technology in Canada and the US, and remains a niche product. The service was seen as "a solution in search of a problem", and the extensive array of options and features were difficult for customers to understand and use. ISDN has long been known by derogatory backronyms highlighting these issues, such as It Still Does Nothing, Innovations Subscribers Don't Need, and I Still Don't kNow, or, from the supposed standpoint of telephone companies, I Smell Dollars Now.
Wow, that explains everything why Americans insist that analog is the way. I will always miss ISDN, but the march of technology insist on IP I guess.
Zoom is entirely dependent on whatever hardware the participants are using. My team switched to using cardioid mics and the audio quality is stellar. It's just when you get that one guy dialing in on his mobile phone with an old pair of wired earbuds with the cord mic that's not anywhere near his mouth. Usually from India, with horns in the background...
Yeah definitely. Well we haven't had analogue phone lines for decades but compared to landlines, mobile can be much better - especially now we have HD Voice which landlines (and call centres apparently) can't access. Maybe it's the extra echo cancellation that's the real problem.
I agree about the delay that sometimes (way more often than it should) occurs in digital calls, but the voice quality of analog calls was shit. It was band limited to something like 8kHz (so maximum of 4kHz signal making it to your ear). That seems like a lot, but it really isn't. There's a significant amount of high end that gets lost and makes everything seem muddled. I remember making calls over 22kHz audio codecs in the late 90s and the quality of even that (maximum frequency transmitted being 11kHz) was way better than an analog phone call.
If you want to see an example of cellphone latency, watch your local news. When they send a reporter to cover a remote story these days, they nearly always use a cellphone as a camera (cheap, ubiquitous, good image quality, and they don't need to pay a separate camera operator).
When the anchor in the studio says "And now over to Lester, who is reporting from the scene" - there's a 1-2 second delay before we hear and see Lester respond.
If the same call was being had over a phone line and we were in the same country, the audio fidelity would be excellent.