3 ms·

Audio quality on cellular is widely variable. If both ends support VoLTE/HD Voice, the audio quality is actually superior to analog.

xhkkffbf 4y ago
I have to agree. People forget how many frequencies made it through the Bell System and the wire lines. Maybe long ago it was 100% analog, but somewhere along the way they started adding in digital compression and that usually meant stripping out all but the most important frequencies. There were several decades when a dial phone to dial phone call produced pretty horrible accoustics.
giraffe_lady 4y ago
Sure but somehow I've only experienced that a handful of times so it's not very "actually superior" in my actual life.
rootusrootus 4y ago
I'd like to experience that. I've never had a cellular voice connection that was even remotely as good as the old analog PSTN.
- myself248 4y ago
  It's wild when I'm talking to family on Signal, which seems to run high quality VoIP even on a non-VoLTE-capable phone. (and the hardware seems to be VoLTE-capable, just Sprint never released the appropriate modem firmware _in my market_, and I've been unsuccessful at hacking apart a rom from india...) But as nice as the quality may be, the latency still sucks. It's just the nature of the beast.
yabones 4y ago
VoLTE with fancy compression didn't make audio quality better, it just freed up bandwidth for carriers to cram more channels in. This has repeated for every single "improvement" in VoIP technology over its ~40 year history, the tradeoff always goes in the direction of making more money instead of offering better service.
- Marsymars 4y ago
  > VoLTE with fancy compression didn't make audio quality better, it just freed up bandwidth for carriers to cram more channels in. Not just that, it’s also used for additional carrier lock-in! (In Canada, carriers were barred from selling carrier-locked phones some years ago, but since VoLTE, they don’t support VoLTE functionality on any phones that haven’t been certified for use on their network, which is limited, in practice, to phone models that they sell themselves. Normally this means you fallback to 3G for calling, unless you happen to be roaming with a carrier/country where 3G service has been dropped, in which case you simply don’t get any voice service.)
- mlyle 4y ago
  VoLTE doesn't do it on its own. If you're calling within the same carrier with "HD voice", AMR-WB at 12.65kbps scores a higher MOS than old-school G.711 64kbps PCM (and is more pleasing in some ways that the MOS doesn't capture). Sure, if they'd just give us another couple dang kilobits/second it'd be way better still, but... At this point, the bandwidth used for voice is pretty much irrelevant from a cellular capacity planning point of view-- people use >5GB/month on average and 24/7 12kbps calling is less than 5GB/month.

xhkkffbf 4y ago

I have to agree. People forget how many frequencies made it through the Bell System and the wire lines. Maybe long ago it was 100% analog, but somewhere along the way they started adding in digital compression and that usually meant stripping out all but the most important frequencies. There were several decades when a dial phone to dial phone call produced pretty horrible accoustics.

giraffe_lady 4y ago

Sure but somehow I've only experienced that a handful of times so it's not very "actually superior" in my actual life.

rootusrootus 4y ago

I'd like to experience that. I've never had a cellular voice connection that was even remotely as good as the old analog PSTN.

myself248 4y ago
It's wild when I'm talking to family on Signal, which seems to run high quality VoIP even on a non-VoLTE-capable phone. (and the hardware seems to be VoLTE-capable, just Sprint never released the appropriate modem firmware _in my market_, and I've been unsuccessful at hacking apart a rom from india...) But as nice as the quality may be, the latency still sucks. It's just the nature of the beast.

yabones 4y ago

VoLTE with fancy compression didn't make audio quality better, it just freed up bandwidth for carriers to cram more channels in. This has repeated for every single "improvement" in VoIP technology over its ~40 year history, the tradeoff always goes in the direction of making more money instead of offering better service.

Marsymars 4y ago
> VoLTE with fancy compression didn't make audio quality better, it just freed up bandwidth for carriers to cram more channels in. Not just that, it’s also used for additional carrier lock-in! (In Canada, carriers were barred from selling carrier-locked phones some years ago, but since VoLTE, they don’t support VoLTE functionality on any phones that haven’t been certified for use on their network, which is limited, in practice, to phone models that they sell themselves. Normally this means you fallback to 3G for calling, unless you happen to be roaming with a carrier/country where 3G service has been dropped, in which case you simply don’t get any voice service.)
mlyle 4y ago
VoLTE doesn't do it on its own. If you're calling within the same carrier with "HD voice", AMR-WB at 12.65kbps scores a higher MOS than old-school G.711 64kbps PCM (and is more pleasing in some ways that the MOS doesn't capture). Sure, if they'd just give us another couple dang kilobits/second it'd be way better still, but... At this point, the bandwidth used for voice is pretty much irrelevant from a cellular capacity planning point of view-- people use >5GB/month on average and 24/7 12kbps calling is less than 5GB/month.