It’s 2024 now, why is the audio quality of phone calls still so bad?

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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

42 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Technology exists, but not everybody is using it. Your call with the bank didn’t go directly to a landline, but through some shitty, broken, old call center system that has a bazillion functions, and was also rerouted 10 times, recompressed at some of those stages, possibly going around the planet twice.

If you call a regular landline, or even a cell with good quality, the call quality is pretty good.

Note also that standards for calls are generally lower than for music. If you have Bluetooth speakers or headphones, try switching to headset mode and run music through that. It’s gonna be pretty bad. And if it goes through all that I outlined above… Yea.

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