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
The convention hasn’t changed.
At first, every call needed it’s own wire. You would pick up the phone with your own wire to the operator and you would tell them who or which number you wanted to contact. They would then unplug their phone from your wire and plug a wire into your phone and the phone of the person you are trying to contact.
This works fine in a small town, but if you wanted to call someone in the next town over, you would call the operator, and they would connect you to the operator of the next town, who would connect you to the person you are trying to reach. The problem was, the number of calls between those two towns was limited by the number of phone lines between those two towns. If there was only one line between those two towns, only one person could call that other town at a time, and everyone else would have to wait.
This is then exaggerated if you wanted to call a distant town, you would need to be routed through several other towns. This is why long distance calls cost so much.
Ironically, phone call quality would actually be better back then. We intentionally made it worse.
We take the range of frequencies human voices are typically in, and we isolate them. When we send the phone signal, we can make the signals occupy a higher or lower frequency, and then on the other end of the call you undo that process so it occupies the human range of hearing again. By doing this, you can send multiple signals down the same wire at once. With the growing demand of phone calls, this was necessary yo avoid building millions of new phone lines all across the country, particularly between cities.
Since then, demand has only grown, and we’ve had go implement more compression techniques, not all of which are lossless, which is why the quality has decreased. This includes the switch from an analog system to digital.
Private phone networks, like among an office building, also need to implement their own compression to allow for multiple phone conversations taking place at once, which adds to the problem even more (but only if that party is involved).
We could go back a fix these issues, but the amount of new phone lines would dramatically increase and we would still be limited by the amount of radio frequencies we can use for cellular communication. Leaving the compression in place is simply much easier.
[Relevant Tom Scott video](https://youtu.be/w2A8q3XIhu0?si=gUfWrjeV5GAN1wAq)
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