
Voice Quality on Smart Phones Still Sucks (2014) - mhb
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/05/3-reasons-voice-quality-on-smart-phones-still-sucks/index.htm
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jfountain2015
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.

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pak
If you want to know the real reason for this, it's because normal cell calls
still have to go over POTS
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service))
on the backend, which typically uses 8-bit mu-law companding of audio at 8kHz.
This compresses the typical frequency range for phone calls to 300-3000Hz,
which is a lot smaller than the real range of human hearing, although it
covers the range used by human speech so it was considered totally acceptable
_before_ unreliable wireless packeting became the typical last leg.

VoIP, FaceTime, Skype and other IP-only technologies can use much better audio
codecs, going all the way up to CD quality audio (44kHz, 16bit). This makes a
huge difference when there is background noise and clipping and less than
optimal transmission conditions.

(Source: I used to work for an IVR company.)

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rcthompson
That doesn't really explain why smartphones (and cell phones in general) sound
so much worse than landlines, does it?

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pak
It's the _combination_ of wireless packets dropping and the audio having to be
degraded to 8bit/8kHz to pass between carriers that really brings on the
terrible. It's kind of like TCP over TCP [1] -- works well enough a lot of the
time, but when it fails, it fails badly because of how the two layers aren't
really built for each other.

[1]: [http://sites.inka.de/bigred/devel/tcp-
tcp.html](http://sites.inka.de/bigred/devel/tcp-tcp.html)

~~~
Aloha
POTS lines do not carry more audio bandwidth than a cell phone. All of them
are 64kbit PCM uncompressed audio.

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cptskippy
I started playing around with a Lumia 530 on T-Mobile which has HD Voice and
the call quality is night and day compared to my Nexus 4. Everyone I've talked
to says the calls sound dramatically better and I'm not aware of anyone who
has HD Voice capable phones. The noise cancelling seems to be a big thing as
most people tell me that they can't tell I'm driving when I have them on
speaker phone.

I didn't realize it had HD Voice and chalked it up to Nokia just knowing how
to make a decent handset.

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tschuy
The Nexus 4 also has HD voice, at least on T-Mobile.

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cptskippy
I seriously question your claim and would require some citation. The Nexus 4
call quality is abysmal and the dual microphones to cancel out background
noise seem to only amplify it. It's not just my phone because I've had 2 now,
I love the phone but it's call quality sucks.

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jhallenworld
My pet peeve is that speaker phone quality was better on cheap flip-phone vs.
what you get a smart phones. This caused me to start using a headset. For home
meetings, my cordless phone's speaker phone is better than any cell phone,
even though it's using "MagicJack".

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s_q_b
The app that I want for my phone is phone.

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

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feld
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.

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smackfu
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.

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feld
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.

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smackfu
Isn't landline better quality than cell?

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feld
Landlines are limited to whatever quality 100 year old degrading copper lines
can carry. It's the bare minimum. I had thought for a long time 3G and better
had wider bandwidth. I'm not certain though.

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kevin_thibedeau
Cell phones actually inject "comfort noise" on the receiving end so that you
can't detect when the stream is cut off during pauses in the conversation. I
would venture that they just keep it on all the time, set above the actual
noise in the voice data stream so that you don't hear two different noise
levels.

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droopybuns
I've been starting to get HD voice calls when I get a hold of someone with a
compatible device. The clarity is so improved that we don't end up talking
about anything but how good the call sounds.

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snuxoll
Call quality on any device I've owned with T-Mobile for the past two years
since I switched from AT&T has been great, more carriers need to get off their
butts and upgrade to HD Voice.

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smackfu
We have AT&T HD Voice here, it's very impressive if you manage to have two
people on new iPhones (6 or better).

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ChuckMcM
So this was from last year it seems. These days there is "HD Voice" on voice
calls on t-mobile. Sounds quite good to my, nominal, ears.

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dswiese
but does the average customer care? similar to how Pono may have better audio
quality, most people are just fine with a compressed mp3.

Its what works and its just good enough.

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smileysteve
> but does the average customer care?

They do, but they don't understand why it's bad. This is 'can you hear me now'
and 'what'd you say' happen most of the time

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thrownaway2424
The wideband "hd audio" codec was developed by telecom people in the 70s. The
problem with mobile is that the vocoder is trying to cope with a channel
having 99% packet loss and latency variance 10x over the mean. The width of
the passband is the least of voice's problems.

The solution to mobile voice's problem is for the carriers to invest in a
network that isn't ludicrously oversold.

