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Comment by wamatt | Hacker News Reader

What evidence is there to suggest this will always be the case, in light of continual improvements?

The cell carrier oligopoly companies are cheap, and would rather use their scarce and immensely valuable resources (bandwidth) to provide new services and open new revenue streams, not boost the quality of existing services which pretty much everyone already pays for.

And, as with many other things, the revealed preferences of many people is that they don't care much about quality of the call relative to other things.

I was just having a conversation with someone earlier today about how the average quality of most of the voice calls we make is far lower than it was decades ago on Ma Bell landlines. Of course, calls are much cheaper now, we have mobile phones, etc. Nonetheless...

Sprint's early on ads about hearing a pin drop on their fiberoptic network seem really quaint today.

I'm pretty sure no landlines from decades ago come even close to a decently configured voice chat server using e.g. Opus.

Which, even stipulating that is the case, is not what most people use. Instead many phone conversations involve "Wait, are you still there" "Can you hear me?" [Shouted] "What?" No, we've most assuredly given up universal quality for convenience and lower prices.

We CAN provide high quality but we mostly don't want to make the tradeoffs to do so.

Opus has lot of variables, but if you could get 53k connections consistently with a modem, you were probably getting quality slightly under G.711 (because of robbed-bit signaling and any analog line noise). PCM encoding has a lot less latency than Opus, and circuit switching means essentially zero jitter. If you don't mind adding some latency, and can control jitter, Opus can handle wider bandwidth audio, and is much more bitrate efficient.

> revealed preferences

It's not like phone companies offered people "better call quality XOR another service", and people consistently picked the second option.

Sure they do. People are ditching landlines to save money even though making do with just a cell phone often gives significantly worse quality. (Which was actually the context of the discussion I mentioned. I was debating giving up my landline--well, Xfinity Voice--even though just using my cell service would result in poorer average call quality.)

That isn't true at all. Most US networks, and may others globally support VoLTE. The difference in sound quality is remarkable, to the point of being unnerving at first.

Do both devices have to support it? What do I need to do to enable and try it, if my network supports it?

In order to make an end-to-end VoLTE call, everything needs to support it and have it enabled: the handsets, the network(s), call handling equipment, interconnections between networks, etc.

You can tell if your handset and network are enabled by making a call while on LTE; if your network indicator drops LTE when you make the call, it's not supported and enabled. Most carriers have a help page with a list of supported devices and how to enable it. I don't know if there's any good indicators that you have an end-to-end enabled call, unless you can tell from the sound quality.

Isn't it still possible to make a low-audio-quality call over the LTE _network_ (i.e. showing LTE when you make a call) due to negotiating down to older codecs if one of the other elements of the connection doesn't support higher-quality codecs?

Yes, that's quite possible, but it's also still the best indicator I'm aware of that you might be getting better quality

you can just disable VoLTE in your mobile, no matter what network you use

I see, thank you. I have two new Xiaomi phones that do list VoLTE in the options, so I'll try calling one from the other and seeing if it works.

Did it?

I don't have them both together yet, I but I will probably update this comment later today. I now notice that I might have been premature, though, as where I am doesn't currently have LTE coverage.

Yeah, this. And also I didn't say it would always be the case, just that it's the case now. (And I'm only even advancing that as a hypothesis.)

Do you have data to back up this definite claim? HN is all about the science.

Cell calls sounded like crap 20 years ago and they still sound like crap. What other sort of evidence do you want?

I'm going to need several statistically rigorous, peer-reviewed studies, that aren't behind paywalls. Please feed me links.

I know you're joking, but if you haven't had the experience of using Skype on a smartphone with someone else, it's worth the hassle. It's incredible how crystal-clear the audio is. It sounds like you're next to the person.

Skype has the best voice quality, followed by land lines, and cell phones are dead last. Cell phone voice quality hasn't improved since my first cell phone in the 90s.

I frequently lately have had to have people call me back on my cellphone because the Skype call quality has been awful. Skype seems to be much more dependent on network conditions.

The Line app (popular in Japan) has incredible voice quality. It's like someone standing right there whispering in my ear.

Actually HN is all about startups. Sometimes that has to do with science, sometimes not.

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