Eli5: why has the sound quality of phone calls improved so little over the last several decades despite us making technological advances in so many areas?
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Firstly, it has improved. Second, fewer and fewer people actually use their cell phones for calling people. You either text them or use FaceTime or an equivalent video messaging app. So it’s not a selling feature.
Voice over LTE improved cell quality massively and has become fairly widely adopted over the past few years. Check your carrier to see what they are supporting on your device, it’s a night and day difference.
Because it all has to work with the old equipment. As others said, you can get better quality with Voice over LTE where the voice gets digitally recorded on the phone and then transmitted over the internet where it is played back directly on the other phone. But with regular calls, they go through tons of other systems that were made decades ago and thye all need to be using the same standards to make sure that all the systems between you and the receiver can actually process the call.
Because the algorithm we use to transfer speech over gsm network has not changed since Nokia developed it in 1995, EFR is still standard in many networks. The higher quality voice calls go over the data networks as voip calls using variety of sampling systems.
To be perfectly honest, if you have not noticed the huge improvement over sound quality, you have a hearing issue. Your premice is completely wrong.
the sound capture itself has improved a lot due to active noise canceling; you have one or two microphone capturing your voice, and 1+ capturing the ambiant sound, that is then substracted through complex digital sound processing. The audio codecs used have massively improved in quality, the radios themselves are also better quality so there are less losses, and protocols with more bandwidth can be used.
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