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Comment by Periodic | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised how much, as consumers, people will put up with in terms of bad audio. I think cell phones really helped lower the bar when the connections were bad but the mobility was unrivaled. I used to hate calling someone's cell phone because the land-line was generally crystal clear and responsive.

Granted, things have improved a lot over the last 10 years, both in cell phones and internet calling. However, video conferencing still seems pretty obsessed with figuring out a way to get high definition video and both audio quality (from the connection and the equipment) and latency haven't improved significantly for major video conferencing solutions.

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Mobile audio is awful because we are oversubscribed. My first mobile was a CDMA PCS phone. My first call on it was for a date. My date assumed I was calling from home on a land line. I was at her front door. The audio was so clean it was indistinguishable from a landline.

Later on, as CDMA phones grew in popularity, the multiplexing grew and the bandwidth shrank. Also codecs got more efficient by flattening the audio. All the atmosphere is stripped from the audio and voice calls got very sterile.

That's the beauty of FaceTime Audio. Awesome quality, as long as you aren't driving. Unfortunately, only ,y wife and I seem to use it!

I use FT Audio and whatsapp as well. FT calls are answerable right away while Whatsapp calls have a whole process: swipe, unlock, find app, open app. By the time I get in my Whatsapp caller has given up. 10 seconds later they'll make a normal cellphone call.

> I'm surprised how much, as consumers, people will put up with in terms of bad audio. I think cell phones really helped lower the bar when the connections were bad but the mobility was unrivaled. I used to hate calling someone's cell phone because the land-line was generally crystal clear and responsive.

VoLTE has been rolling out (slowly) over the past few years, but has hit a human-based stumbling block. People now expect background noise on phone calls, and may mistake its absence for a signal that the call has been dropped.

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