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Voice Quality on Smart Phones Still Sucks (2014)

consumerreports.org

11–20 of 47 posts

Re: Voice Quality on Smart Phones Still Sucks (2014)

#13

Cell quality of GSM/CDMA or others isn't good but the article ignores all the Wi-fi calling, FaceTime Audio and VOIP type calls you can make on a smart phone now. I've found that those are substantially better quality than any landline or cell.

Also since the article has written, VoLTE has launched on many networks which is a huge improvement

Re: Voice Quality on Smart Phones Still Sucks (2014)

#14
post #7

VoLTE is becoming fairly prevalent now. With the new wideband codecs, quality can be quite good.

The problem is that there is no cross-carrier HD voice or VoLTE. If you call someone on another carrier your call quality will be flushed down the toilet. These idiots refuse to inter-operate. This is why data calling (Facetime audio, Google Hangouts(?), Skype, Whatsapp, etc) is going to crush the cellular industry. It's going to be fragmented and ugly, but at least the call quality won't suck.

Cellular carriers at this point are really just low traffic ISPs anyway.

Re: Voice Quality on Smart Phones Still Sucks (2014)

#15
post #10
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that there is no cross-carrier HD voice or VoLTE. If you call someone on another carrier your call quality will be flushed down the toilet. These idiots refuse to inter-operate. This is why data calling (Facetime audio, Google Hangouts(?), Skype, Whatsapp, etc) is going to crush the cellular industry. It's going to be fragmented and ugly, but at least the call quality won't suck.

It seems like if you are calling another network, your network should be able to terminate your HD voice call at the edge, and you would still get at least wired telephone quality.

That's what you get, and it's bad.

It's so bad these days I can't stand talking on the phone to anyone who isn't using data (facetime, etc) or HD Voice. I literally cannot understand what people are saying half the time. And company support phone numbers? The worst. Their callcenters are using terrible voip with overloaded trunks.

It feels like we've spent the last 10 years trying to kill the phone call.

Re: Voice Quality on Smart Phones Still Sucks (2014)

#16
post #7

VoLTE is becoming fairly prevalent now. With the new wideband codecs, quality can be quite good.

The problem is that there is no cross-carrier HD voice or VoLTE. If you call someone on another carrier your call quality will be flushed down the toilet. These idiots refuse to inter-operate. This is why data calling (Facetime audio, Google Hangouts(?), Skype, Whatsapp, etc) is going to crush the cellular industry. It's going to be fragmented and ugly, but at least the call quality won't suck.

None of those IP voice services interoperate either, it's the same issue just at another layer with a different set of greedy corporations.

Re: Voice Quality on Smart Phones Still Sucks (2014)

#17

Cell quality of GSM/CDMA or others isn't good but the article ignores all the Wi-fi calling, FaceTime Audio and VOIP type calls you can make on a smart phone now. I've found that those are substantially better quality than any landline or cell.

Yeah, consumer reports is blaming the cell phones for poor voice quality, but it really seems to be the phone companies.

In a previous job most of my team worked out of Bulgaria, and I could hear them better over Skype on my iPhone than I could hear my wife on a regular phone call. Headphones helped the sound quality even more, but it really wasn't necessary.

Re: Voice Quality on Smart Phones Still Sucks (2014)

#18
post #16
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that there is no cross-carrier HD voice or VoLTE. If you call someone on another carrier your call quality will be flushed down the toilet. These idiots refuse to inter-operate. This is why data calling (Facetime audio, Google Hangouts(?), Skype, Whatsapp, etc) is going to crush the cellular industry. It's going to be fragmented and ugly, but at least the call quality won't suck.

None of those IP voice services interoperate either, it's the same issue just at another layer with a different set of greedy corporations.

True, but it's easy to switch between these upper-level services. It's a pain to change cell providers (in the US).

Re: Voice Quality on Smart Phones Still Sucks (2014)

#20
post #7

VoLTE is becoming fairly prevalent now. With the new wideband codecs, quality can be quite good.

The problem is that there is no cross-carrier HD voice or VoLTE. If you call someone on another carrier your call quality will be flushed down the toilet. These idiots refuse to inter-operate. This is why data calling (Facetime audio, Google Hangouts(?), Skype, Whatsapp, etc) is going to crush the cellular industry. It's going to be fragmented and ugly, but at least the call quality won't suck.

>>These idiots refuse to inter-operate.

Not true. There is tremendous effort in place trying to get IMS roaming/interop working. http://www.gsma.com/newsroom/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/IR.6...

The problem isn't idiots refusing to interoperate, it's that the standards are implemented in subtly different ways between operators.

So if you're on an AT&T or VZW network making calls to a Sprint person, you have 5 dependencies in play:

1) IMS compatible home network w/ HD voice codec support 2) HD Voice compatible home device 3) IMS compatible destination network w/ HD voice codec support 4) Interop agreement between carriers. 5) HD Voice compatible destination device.

Device churn is just as big a hurdle as the non-trivial network compatibility problem.

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