
Why Can't We Have HD Audio and SIP on the 4 Major US Carriers? - trome
So, why can&#x27;t we have HD Audio? We know T-Mobile has SIP servers that play nice with others[1] when they aren&#x27;t walled off, Sprint supports SIP as that is how RingPlus (which supported G722 HD Audio), Google Voice, Bandwidth.com and others tie in, AT&amp;T offered nearly the same type of interconnection with their WebRTC developer offering they killed a month ago, and Verizon has been showing the SIP URI as of late too[2].<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it be possible to get the IPSec cert off a few phones and get access to these PBXes&#x2F;SBCs, so we can get decent quality audio? As it stands today, carriers are essentially driving away their customers with low quality G711 audio or worse, no one is benefiting from high bitrate, low quality audio.<p>1 - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;tmobile&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2y4glg&#x2F;calling_tmobile_subscribers_directly_via_sip&#x2F;
2 - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;verizon&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2y7nrd&#x2F;is_it_possible_to_call_verizon_subscribers_with&#x2F;
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PaulHoule
The big one is that cell phone providers aren't that interested in telephony
these days.

I did an extended stint of B2B sales over the phone and I can say that cell
phones have made life much worse for anybody who talks over the phone. You
discover that people in "normal" built-up places like Encino, CA are making
calls on their cells with constant dropouts. Or that you can't get a GSM
signal two blocks from the intersection of Hollywood and Vine, or you might
even be unlucky enough to be on a conference call that is interrupted by a car
crash. (It happened to me!)

Any criticism of the cell phone culture will get you voted down, after all,
almost every article in a lifestyle publication leads with some reference to
how attached we are our to "our" smartphones but the fact is that people are
flapping their lips constantly but not all that concerned about understanding
what the other people say, otherwise they'd ditch their cells for a real
phone.

B2B sales over the phone can vary across the board from tedious to nerve-
wracking to a lot of fun, but if you can't hear what people are saying, and
they can't hear now, it is much harder. If B2B sales matter at all to the
economy I'd imagine that cell phones are knocking a few percent off our GDP.

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trome
Cell phones definitely have caused a notable drop in audio quality. Massive
carriers like Verizon for example felt they could compress calls quite
heavily, destroying audio quality in the process.

VoLTE could improve the situation, if we could get the HD audio to actually
make it off the cell carrier's network. Currently, no US Cell Carrier does so
tho.

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PaulHoule
In Europe, the coming of cell phones brought lower phone bills and better
service. I spent 1998 and 1999 in the former East Germany and found it was a
mistake to get a landline from Deusche Telecom and I should have just gotten a
"handy" instead but I grew up in a country that had a regulated monopoly
telecom (AT&T) as opposed to a government- or post-office- run phone company.
In Europe, cell phones brought competition and lower prices.

In the US, on the other hand, phone bills went up as cell phones came in, and
the quality of the service went way down.

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narrowrail
When I got my first cell phone at the end of ’96, I paid $40/mo with 1000min
on VoiceStream (now owned by TMobile). There were no long distance charges.
Meanwhile, my friends were paying $60/mo to what is now CenturyLink (Qwest at
the time) plus long distance charges.

I realize it’s anecdotal, but I think phone service got ~30% cheaper at
minimum (much more when including long distance). If you remember at the end
of the 90’s, the telco’s were running crazy amounts of long distance
advertisements (i.e. 10-10-220) knowing full well that gravy train was coming
to an end.

