Why is the quality so bad when calling people from your phone, but not when you are calling on an app – like Discord?
In: Technology
voip programs have a lot more data to work with when it comes to the audio data they are sending. the more data you can send back and forth at a time, the clearer the audio can be.
The actual phone network is a mess. Discord uses data.
In ancient times, when the phone network was created, we couldn’t actually transmit data fast enough for crystal-clear voice calls. So the phone network does fast compression. It filters out a lot of frequencies. The result is it’s much lower quality.
We don’t *need* to do that now, but the infrastructure for the phone network is spread across the country and involves hundreds of thousands of machines. Not all of them are brand-new. Not all of them can support crystal-clear transmission. So all of that network maintains the filtering *just in case* some equipment between you and the person you’re talking to can’t handle modern speeds. Even cell towers do this because so long as a machine CAN connect to the normal phone network, it MUST assume it needs to do that filtering.
Discord doesn’t use the phone network directly. It uses a data stream over the internet. ALL of those machines are set up to handle modern data speeds, and the system’s set up so if somehow a machine along the way isn’t, your traffic will get routed around it. They still do some compression or filtering, but they don’t need to be constrained by early 20th century data transfer standards.
compression. Phone calls today are often highly compressed using VoIP codecs like G.729. Many data calls and apps use a less compressive codec, which means cleaner sounding calls. Many smart phones have a ‘high def’ setting that can be enabled to increase call clarity.
The phone function of your smartphone is backwards compatible with a rotary dial telephone from the 1940s. It just takes a lot of adapters between them.
Discord gets the benefit of starting from a clean slate without having to support equipment older than their userbase.
I don’t know if it’s still true, but waaaay back in the day, there was a cell company called Nextel. They had some cool features like a press-to-talk button that would immediately connect to to another Nextel phone you had set, like a two way radio.
They did roll out a super-clear voice call feature. People hated it. It was *too* clear. They cancelled that feature and returned to the tinny call quality. People are weird.
Latest Answers