4 ms·

Quality of calls has dropped through the floor, instead of a well-regulated, government-enforced monopoly, we now have poorly-regulated, government-enforced tri

by kick 7y ago

Quality of calls has dropped through the floor, instead of a well-regulated, government-enforced monopoly, we now have poorly-regulated, government-enforced triopolies on a variety of services (telephony, networking, television, the physical routing thereof, et cetera), most of the aforementioned triopolies partially or entirely consisting of Baby Bells that purchased other Baby Bells... Yeah, I'd definitely say it didn't work out. The Standard Oil breakup was mostly useless, their monopoly power had mostly dissolved as they weren't anywhere near a monopoly by the time it happened, and for that matter, it rewarded Rockefeller by making his wealth skyrocket.

trentnix 7y ago
AT&T was broken up in 1982. Call quality is quite a bit better since then. In the country, we had a party line up to that point. Same location today is still rural but has digital telephony, high speed Internet, and multiple cellular providers.
- kick 7y ago
  Basically everyone agrees that both latency and audio quality has decreased, and that can be measured (without sophistication) simply by checking radio & television call-ins over the past fifty years. It was slightly reduced with the introduction of wideband audio (not the latency problem, though), but has mostly gotten worse over time. This is a great answer on Quora from a few years back to a question on why call audio hadn't improved, where the author explains that it hadn't just not improved, it had actually declined over time: https://www.quora.com/Why-has-the-audio-quality-of-phone-calls-not-improved-over-time-like-visual-media-has/answer/Dave-Haynie https://www.quora.com/Why-has-the-audio-quality-of-phone-cal... There was also a great IEEE Spectrum post from a bit before the takeover of VoLTE and wideband audio as to why the decline had happened (and was probably going to accelerate as providers moved to switch from the PSTN to VoIP internally): https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/why-mobile-voice-quality-still-stinksand-how-to-fix-it https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/why-mobile-voice-...
  - kick 7y ago
    Typo: "both latency [has increased] and audio quality decreased"

by kick 7y ago

trentnix 7y ago

AT&T was broken up in 1982. Call quality is quite a bit better since then. In the country, we had a party line up to that point. Same location today is still rural but has digital telephony, high speed Internet, and multiple cellular providers.

kick 7y ago
Basically everyone agrees that both latency and audio quality has decreased, and that can be measured (without sophistication) simply by checking radio & television call-ins over the past fifty years. It was slightly reduced with the introduction of wideband audio (not the latency problem, though), but has mostly gotten worse over time. This is a great answer on Quora from a few years back to a question on why call audio hadn't improved, where the author explains that it hadn't just not improved, it had actually declined over time: https://www.quora.com/Why-has-the-audio-quality-of-phone-calls-not-improved-over-time-like-visual-media-has/answer/Dave-Haynie https://www.quora.com/Why-has-the-audio-quality-of-phone-cal... There was also a great IEEE Spectrum post from a bit before the takeover of VoLTE and wideband audio as to why the decline had happened (and was probably going to accelerate as providers moved to switch from the PSTN to VoIP internally): https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/why-mobile-voice-quality-still-stinksand-how-to-fix-it https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/why-mobile-voice-...
- kick 7y ago
  Typo: "both latency [has increased] and audio quality decreased"