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

Phone call quality can be quite good, especially with end to end digital connections. Some companies, especially established older companies like banks, have old shitty phone systems, which degrade the audio quality of people using them (some still use FM radio as hold music).

Streaming audio and video suffers from the same problem as phone calls. Live streams are not universal clear and high quality. We can send *prerecorded* audio and video at excellent quality consistently because we can resend data that failed to arrive. You can’t do that when the data stream must be real time.

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