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Comment by oomkiller | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

Isn't landline better quality than cell?

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.

I don't think the carriers would want to, a traditional voice call is 'less expensive' than a HD Voice call.

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

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).

> It's a pain to change cell providers (in the US).

What!? You can port your number from one carrier to another with ease, for several years now.

>>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.

Exactly. The only realistic way to do it in the short term I think is to have everything fall back to G.711 but they you still end up with multiple codecs which is not idea.

Also you can configure your verizon phone to use voLTE and then google voice supports it, so you can get some voLTE benefits (like using data while on the phone) and voLTE to carriers verizon doesn't yet partner with for voLTE

(VoLTE is branded as HD Voice for many phones.)

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