We have the technology required to record, transmit and play high fidelity audio and video. Why are the phone calls’ quality still so bad as if we’re talking over walkie-talkies?
In other words, we definitely \*can\* have high quality phone calls. Why is it that the carriers (or whoever responsible for building the underlying infrastructure) choose to not make this improvement yet?
Edit: the question came up after finishing a call with my bank. I’m pretty sure the CS on the other end used a landline phone and the audio quality was no bueno. Maybe my impression on the phone calls’ quality can have some recency bias involved. So please correct me if phone call qualities aren’t that bad in your region or in your experience .
In: Technology
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Because there is no compelling reason to do so. There’s no evidence that people would pay more for higher phone call quality, so either the companies have to eat this cost for no value OR… they could just not.
> **still** so bad?
Of course, your comment only pertains to cellphone calls. I think POTS (“Plain Old Telephone Service” via copper wires infrastructure) calls are still superb quality, no? (I have VoIP so I can’t know directly). I grew up in the POTS-only era and essentially 100% of phone calls were perfection. Ah.
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Compatibility with old phone systems.
While the number of old phone systems is decreasing in favor of VOIP (Internet phones) or no landline at all in favor of cell phones… there are still plenty of people using analog phones on dedicated phone lines, and plenty of houses where that is the only connection.
While your cell phone could use an internet signal to send high fidelity audio, the backbone of the phone network is not prepared to accept that. This is because it could be sending that call out on a line that does not support the higher quality, to a phone that does not support it.
Because phones are an important utility that even has safety implications, like the ability to call 911, there are legal requirements for phone companies to maintain that support. While a phone company may be able to build support for higher quality audio between compatible devices, that wouldn’t be able to drop support for the old systems, so there is little benefit to offset the cost of that upgrade.
Meanwhile customers who care can make FaceTime or Facebook or Zoom calls if they want to take advantage of the internet’s ability to send higher quality audio, so there isn’t much pressure on phone companies to improve their service.
Some cell service modes do offer higher quality because the phones at both end are compatible with new digital technology, but the system overall is based on the same things the telephone industry had been doing for over a hundred years prior.
In analog service, the frequency range is limited between around 300hz to 3.5KHz, which is just enough bandwidth to hear speech decently (and not much more). This is due to limitations and compromises necessary for analog telephone service to handle so many lines at once, including methods that allow multiple voice signals down the same wires.
Answer: It’s good enough.
What is the advantage of having better audio if you already can understand someone? If you can make it better with the same amount of bandwidth, you can make it the same quality with lower bandwidth. Why do we need more bandwidth? To make more room for high speed internet and sending photos and videos? So lower bandwidth with the same blah quality wins so they can offer you higher speed data for everything else.
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They definitely have gotten better though. Unless your point of comparison is only like 5 years ago.
And certainly much better than walkie-talkies.
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