5 ms·

Nah, it's mostly just buffering :-) Plus the cell phone industry paved the way for VOIP by getting everyone used to really, really crappy voice quality. Genera

Nah, it's mostly just buffering :-) Plus the cell phone industry paved the way for VOIP by getting everyone used to really, really crappy voice quality. Generations of Bell Labs and Bellcore engineers would rather have resigned than be subjected to what's considered acceptable voice quality nowadays...

hedgehog 2y ago
Yes, I think most video on the Internet is HLS and similar approaches which are about as far from the ATM circuit-switching approach as it gets. For those unfamiliar HLS is pretty much breaking the video into chunks to download over plain HTTP.
- matt-attack 2y ago
  Yes, but that's entirely orthogonal to the "coding" algorithms being used and which are specifically responsible for the improvement that GP was describing. HLS is really just a way to empower the client with the ownership of the playback logic. Let the client handle forward buffering, retries, stream selection, etc.
nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
>> Plus the cell phone industry paved the way for VOIP by getting everyone used to really, really crappy voice quality What accounts for this difference? Is there something inherently worse about the nature of cell phone infrastructure over land-line use? I'm totally naive on such subjects. I'm just old enough to remember landlines being widespread, but nearly all of my phone calls have been via cell since the mid 00s, so I can't judge quality differences given the time that's passed.
- hnuser123456 2y ago
  Because at some point, someone decided that 8 kbps makes for an acceptable audio stream per subscriber. And at first, the novelty of being able to call anyone anywhere, even with this awful quality, was novel enough that people would accept it. And most people did until the carriers decided they could allocate a little more with VoLTE, if it works on your phone in your area.
  - ipdashc 2y ago
    > Because at some point, someone decided that 8 kbps makes for an acceptable audio stream per subscriber. Has it not been like this for a very long time? I was under the impression that "voice frequency" being defined as up to 4 kHz was a very old standard - after all, (long-distance) phone calls have always been multiplexed through coaxial or microwave links. And it follows that 8kbps is all you need to losslessly digitally sample that. I assumed it was jitter and such that lead to lower quality of VoIP/cellular, but that's a total guess. Along with maybe compression algorithms that try to squeeze the stream even tighter than 8kbps? But I wouldn't have figured it was the 8kHz sample rate at fault, right?
    - hnuser123456 2y ago
      Sure, if you stop after "nobody's vocal coords make noises above 4khz in normal conversation", but the rumbling of the vocal coords isn't the entire audio data which is present in-person. Clicks of the tongue and smacking of the lips make much higher frequencies, and higher sample rates capture the timbre/shape of the soundwave instead of rounding it down to a smooth sine wave. Discord defaults to 64kbps, but you can push it up to 96kbps or 128kbps with nitro membership, and it's not hard to hear an improvement with the higher bitrates. And if you've ever used bluetooth audio, you know the difference in quality between the bidirectional call profile, and the unidirectional music profile, and wished to have the bandwidth of the music profile with the low latency of the call profile.
      - troad 2y ago
        > Sure, if you stop after "nobody's vocal coords make noises above 4khz in normal conversation" Huh? What? That's not even remotely true. If you read your comment out loud, the very first sound you'd make would have almost all of its energy concentrated between 4 and 10 kHz. Human vocal cords constantly hit up to around 10 kHz, though auditory distinctiveness is more concentrated below 4 kHz. It is unevenly distributed though, with sounds like <s> and <sh> being (infamously) severely degraded by a 4 kHz cut-off.
    - loodish 2y ago
WalterBright 2y ago
I've noticed this when talking on the phone with someone with a significant accent. 1. it takes considerable work on my part to understand it on a cell phone 2. it's much easier on POTS 3. it's not a problem on VOIP 4. no issues in person With all the amazing advances in cell phones, the voice quality of cellular is stuck in the 90's.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  I generally travel to Europe, and it baffles why I can't use VoLTE there (maybe my roaming doesn't allow that), and fallback to 3G for voice calls. At home, I use VoLTE and the sound is almost impeccable, very high quality, but in the places I roam to, what I get is FM quality 3G sound. It's not that cellular network is incapable of that sound quality, but I don't get to experience it except my home country. Interesting, indeed.
  - stevesimmons 2y ago
    In which countries? 3G networks in many European countries were shut off in 2022-2024. The few remaining ones will go too over the next couple of years. VoLTE is 5G, common throughout Europe. However the handset manufacturer may need to qualify each handset model with local carriers before they will connect using VoLTE. As I understand the situation, Google for instance has only qualified Pixel phones for 5G in 19 of 170-odd countries. So 5G features like VoLTE may not be available in all countries. This is very handset/country/carrier-dependent.
    - j45 2y ago
      VoLTE can very well be 5G now, and it can vary from country to country, but my first memoryof VoLTE is originally started with LTE/4G networks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_LTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_LTE
    - kalleboo 2y ago
      > VoLTE is 5G Technically, on 5G you have "VoNR"[0], where VoLTE is over 4G. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_NR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_NR

hedgehog 2y ago

Yes, I think most video on the Internet is HLS and similar approaches which are about as far from the ATM circuit-switching approach as it gets. For those unfamiliar HLS is pretty much breaking the video into chunks to download over plain HTTP.

matt-attack 2y ago
Yes, but that's entirely orthogonal to the "coding" algorithms being used and which are specifically responsible for the improvement that GP was describing. HLS is really just a way to empower the client with the ownership of the playback logic. Let the client handle forward buffering, retries, stream selection, etc.

nyarlathotep_ 2y ago

>> Plus the cell phone industry paved the way for VOIP by getting everyone used to really, really crappy voice quality What accounts for this difference? Is there something inherently worse about the nature of cell phone infrastructure over land-line use? I'm totally naive on such subjects. I'm just old enough to remember landlines being widespread, but nearly all of my phone calls have been via cell since the mid 00s, so I can't judge quality differences given the time that's passed.

hnuser123456 2y ago
Because at some point, someone decided that 8 kbps makes for an acceptable audio stream per subscriber. And at first, the novelty of being able to call anyone anywhere, even with this awful quality, was novel enough that people would accept it. And most people did until the carriers decided they could allocate a little more with VoLTE, if it works on your phone in your area.
- ipdashc 2y ago
  > Because at some point, someone decided that 8 kbps makes for an acceptable audio stream per subscriber. Has it not been like this for a very long time? I was under the impression that "voice frequency" being defined as up to 4 kHz was a very old standard - after all, (long-distance) phone calls have always been multiplexed through coaxial or microwave links. And it follows that 8kbps is all you need to losslessly digitally sample that. I assumed it was jitter and such that lead to lower quality of VoIP/cellular, but that's a total guess. Along with maybe compression algorithms that try to squeeze the stream even tighter than 8kbps? But I wouldn't have figured it was the 8kHz sample rate at fault, right?
  - hnuser123456 2y ago
    Sure, if you stop after "nobody's vocal coords make noises above 4khz in normal conversation", but the rumbling of the vocal coords isn't the entire audio data which is present in-person. Clicks of the tongue and smacking of the lips make much higher frequencies, and higher sample rates capture the timbre/shape of the soundwave instead of rounding it down to a smooth sine wave. Discord defaults to 64kbps, but you can push it up to 96kbps or 128kbps with nitro membership, and it's not hard to hear an improvement with the higher bitrates. And if you've ever used bluetooth audio, you know the difference in quality between the bidirectional call profile, and the unidirectional music profile, and wished to have the bandwidth of the music profile with the low latency of the call profile.
    - troad 2y ago
      > Sure, if you stop after "nobody's vocal coords make noises above 4khz in normal conversation" Huh? What? That's not even remotely true. If you read your comment out loud, the very first sound you'd make would have almost all of its energy concentrated between 4 and 10 kHz. Human vocal cords constantly hit up to around 10 kHz, though auditory distinctiveness is more concentrated below 4 kHz. It is unevenly distributed though, with sounds like <s> and <sh> being (infamously) severely degraded by a 4 kHz cut-off.
  - loodish 2y ago

WalterBright 2y ago

I've noticed this when talking on the phone with someone with a significant accent. 1. it takes considerable work on my part to understand it on a cell phone 2. it's much easier on POTS 3. it's not a problem on VOIP 4. no issues in person With all the amazing advances in cell phones, the voice quality of cellular is stuck in the 90's.

bayindirh 2y ago
I generally travel to Europe, and it baffles why I can't use VoLTE there (maybe my roaming doesn't allow that), and fallback to 3G for voice calls. At home, I use VoLTE and the sound is almost impeccable, very high quality, but in the places I roam to, what I get is FM quality 3G sound. It's not that cellular network is incapable of that sound quality, but I don't get to experience it except my home country. Interesting, indeed.
- stevesimmons 2y ago
  In which countries? 3G networks in many European countries were shut off in 2022-2024. The few remaining ones will go too over the next couple of years. VoLTE is 5G, common throughout Europe. However the handset manufacturer may need to qualify each handset model with local carriers before they will connect using VoLTE. As I understand the situation, Google for instance has only qualified Pixel phones for 5G in 19 of 170-odd countries. So 5G features like VoLTE may not be available in all countries. This is very handset/country/carrier-dependent.
  - j45 2y ago
    VoLTE can very well be 5G now, and it can vary from country to country, but my first memoryof VoLTE is originally started with LTE/4G networks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_LTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_LTE
  - kalleboo 2y ago
    > VoLTE is 5G Technically, on 5G you have "VoNR"[0], where VoLTE is over 4G. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_NR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_NR