Lo-Fi Phones and the Future

bossanovalithium writes "Back in 1936 — 74 years ago — boffins accepted that about 3.3Khz was the accepted frequency that telephone calls are going to run on and it's been like that, generally, ever since. Call quality is reasonable but leaves a lot to be desired. Think calls from Skype to Skype where quality is often crystal clear." It's crazy to me that (for people with decent mics at least) Ventrillo sounds better than corporate conference calls.

worst summary ever?

[Surt]

This has got to be up there in the competition. Doesn't layout a summary of the article. Offers an opinion about some piece of software I've never heard of. No hint of whether or not there's a proposed solution.
Bizarre.

Re:Latency?

[M. Kristopeit]

latency does not get the respect it should... ease of implementation and ease of expansion has been steamrolling over latency for years... the developers would rather make their lives easier than make their user's lives better.

TAKE PRIDE IN YOUR PRODUCT.

Re:Noooooo!!!!!!

[sjames]

Actually, I got my converter box. It doesn't work all that well compared to the reception I had before. It turns out that a bit of snow and occasional crackle is much easier to deal with than frozen picture and silence. Meanwhile, the freed up spectrum was all snapped up for more of the same from overly greedy telecoms.

Telephones and Mic's

[EEPROMS]

The company I have been working for has been testing a wide range of VoIP handsets and what surprised us the most is even though the phones themselves can use a wideband codec (Siren 16 comes to mind) the actual handpiece mic design is primitive to say the least (not talking el cheapo digital telephones here but models around $300-600). A majority of the models we tested had a simple pin hole mic on the handpiece with no noise canceling at all (done in software I suspect). We often found that by just changing the handset for one with a good noise canceling mic within a well thought out internal cavity (yes even the internal shape of the handset effects the audio quality) improved the quality of the audio massively. We suspect the reason for this is because designers now think they can do everything in software, The reality doesnt match up so you have these expensive digital telephones with very well designed codecs but the hardware so badly designed audio wise that you end up with audio quality that is no better (or worse) than a analogue handset.