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Cell quality of GSM/CDMA or others isn't good but the article ignores all the Wi-fi calling, FaceTime Audio and VOIP type calls you can make on a smart phone n
by jfountain2015 11y ago
Cell quality of GSM/CDMA or others isn't good but the article ignores all the Wi-fi calling, FaceTime Audio and VOIP type calls you can make on a smart phone now. I've found that those are substantially better quality than any landline or cell.
- kalleboo 11y agoAlso since the article has written, VoLTE has launched on many networks which is a huge improvement
- jobu 11y agoYeah, consumer reports is blaming the cell phones for poor voice quality, but it really seems to be the phone companies. In a previous job most of my team worked out of Bulgaria, and I could hear them better over Skype on my iPhone than I could hear my wife on a regular phone call. Headphones helped the sound quality even more, but it really wasn't necessary.
- eco 11y agoMy brother accidentally called me with Hangouts the other day and the quality was just shockingly better. I've started using it instead of a regular call where it makes sense (i.e. the other person is on hangouts+wifi too, essentially. I don't want to use up their data plan for it).
- pak 11y agoIf you want to know the real reason for this, it's because normal cell calls still have to go over POTS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service) on the backend, which typically uses 8-bit mu-law companding of audio at 8kHz. This compresses the typical frequency range for phone calls to 300-3000Hz, which is a lot smaller than the real range of human hearing, although it covers the range used by human speech so it was considered totally acceptable before unreliable wireless packeting became the typical last leg. VoIP, FaceTime, Skype and other IP-only technologies can use much better audio codecs, going all the way up to CD quality audio (44kHz, 16bit). This makes a huge difference when there is background noise and clipping and less than optimal transmission conditions. (Source: I used to work for an IVR company.)
- rcthompson 11y agoThat doesn't really explain why smartphones (and cell phones in general) sound so much worse than landlines, does it?
- pak 11y agoIt's the combination of wireless packets dropping and the audio having to be degraded to 8bit/8kHz to pass between carriers that really brings on the terrible. It's kind of like TCP over TCP [1] -- works well enough a lot of the time, but when it fails, it fails badly because of how the two layers aren't really built for each other. [1]: http://sites.inka.de/bigred/devel/tcp-tcp.html http://sites.inka.de/bigred/devel/tcp-tcp.html
- rcthompson 11y agoAh, ok, that makes more sense.
- Aloha 11y agoPOTS lines do not carry more audio bandwidth than a cell phone. All of them are 64kbit PCM uncompressed audio.
- Aloha 11y agoCompression largely, EVRC and GSM (CDMA and GSM respectively) are pretty heavily compressed, while I prefer the sound of EVRC, both are compressed - another thing to point out is most smartphones are pretty lousy telephones, bad earpieces, poor microphones, and so on. If you want to see how cellular handset can perform, use a good communications grade handset.
- tumba 11y agoAny recommendations or examples of "good communications grade" handsets?
- thaumasiotes 11y ago> This compresses the typical frequency range for phone calls to 300-3000Hz, which is a lot smaller than the real range of human hearing, although it covers the range used by human speech so it was considered totally acceptable before unreliable wireless packeting became the typical last leg. But... landline telephones have always mangled human speech. They're awful.