A question posed on Dvorak about Skype on the iPhone brought this:It costs money to build a network. It costs money to employ the people to service it and you.
This is a very valid point. Without revenue there would be no phone service. We should expect to pay for phone service, and while I think mobile costs are still too high, I don't think that land line costs are too egregious.
My question is why the voice quality hasn’t improved. The phone calls we make today, whether over land line or cell phone, still sound like the ones we made in 1989. It’s still AM quality when we should be getting FM quality. Why can't the phone companies make the quality as clean and near true fidelity as a Skype call?
2 comments:
Because that quality takes up bandwith. With Skype, you have all the bandwith you need, even at a minimum of DSL. Cell is a different beast altogether, especially the Air Interface between the Base Transeiver Station and your phone.
Disclaimer: I used to be employed at one of the giant mobile network manufacturers.
Voice was deliberately clipped, dynamically compressed, phase compressed and weird signal stuff that are still trade secrets. Some was for noise reduction, some to save energy, some to add capacity and some to thwart using the signal for anything other than voice.
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