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

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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