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
There are some calls that have higher quality audio. Some US cell phones support “HD Voice” which uses the phones data connection to send digital voice. With LTE, 5G, and even Wifi connections, if both phones support HD voice, the audio quality is excellent. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_LTE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_LTE) or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_NR.
There are a bunch of IFs in that sentence, so it doesn’t always work.
When it doesn’t work, phones revert to the lowest common denominator connection. These systems were designed to limit the amount of data used in each call, so they reduce the audio quality.
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