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 .
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The basic answer is people don’t want it or want to pay for it. In the limitations of a standard analog phone line is about 64kbps, a technology called ISDN was investigated to allow double capacity of a regular phone line at about 128kbps. You could use to do video calling or 2 phone calls at once or a very clear line.
People pretty much had no interest in it at the time. Didn’t fancy having to dress properly to video call, and didn’t like how their voice sounded on high data lines. They liked how regular analog lines hid defects in their voice.
Here we are today, we could make high quality microphones. But again the market demand isn’t really there for it outside of niche situations. There is less resistance to video calls today but still there is resistance to it if the person isn’t dressed up showered and whatever
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.
The UK is currently retiring its old landline telephone network, and replacing it with an IP telephony system.
Instead of sending calls down your twisted-pair telephone wires as 8 KHz analogue signals (alongside higher-frequency digital broadband signals), the 8 KHz analogue band is being scrapped, and phone calls are being sent down the TCP/IP broadband channel the same as your home Internet connection.
This requires a new telephone handset, which is able to interface with your home broadband router. These are cordless DECT phones (using the relatively modern Cat-IQ standard) than indeed supports crystal clear voice audio. The audio quality is frankly excellent.
Why you still experience poor audio quality on a call with this setup is down to several reasons:
* You could be using an old analogue phone that’s plugged into the modern home router’s legacy phone jack. This downgrades the new phone line to an analogue signal inside your house’s last few feet (but still digital to the exchange)
* The person you’re calling has an old handset, or an old telephone line
The infrastructure has to be compatible.
If one end has 16 bit 44kHz audio it’s not much use because the other end will be telephone quality.
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Because we have decided to retain compatability with old phones. Call center voip systems will support the bare minimum codecs.
We could do much higher quality calls, but we’d need to accept that all “classic” phones are obsolete and toss them. We cannot make the call quality massively better for older phones, only between two newer devices.
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