Lo-Fi Phones and the Future 228
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.
Pardon me, but... (Score:1, Interesting)
boffins?
Do everyday Brits actually use this word conversationally?
Latency? (Score:4, Interesting)
My experience with Skype, VOIP, and even to a lesser degree cell phones is that they all have latency worse than landlines. Is this actually true?
We were considering switching our business phone lines over to Time Warner voip. I talked to one of their people on the phone. My side was landline, theirs was time warner voip. The delay was awful. We kept talking over each other. If that's the best Time Warner can do, I was very not impressed, and as a result was still have our more expensive landlines.
Is there anything to my complaint, or have I just had bad luck??
Who saves your data? (Score:2, Interesting)
At 3KHz, with compression, you can now record every conversation, from birth to death, of a connection. Think about who wants that data. I would guess that from the moment you aquire your first cell phone contract, the providers are saving all your conversations. What's the point of a wire tap when that data is available upon request? In our post 9/11 world, I would be amazed if it doesn't already work that way.
You think talking on an iPad is wrong (Score:2, Interesting)
But in actual practice, if you have a $40 Wireless N router, an iPad makes a very cheap phone.
And it comes with the ability in the new model releasing later this year to use iFace to share pics while you talk with iSkype.
Computers were originally used mostly for accounting, calculating missile trajectories, and for other stuff, but we don't use them to do that now, for the most part.
Skype = Quality ?!? (Score:1, Interesting)
Not bloody likely. Maybe in a perfect world with computers directly connected but every real world example of Skype that I have seen was awful.
Re:Its crazy to me... (Score:1, Interesting)
What's crazy to me is that people think they know what a "decent mic" is. For voice communications it's one with limited frequency range so that superfluous frequencies are attenuated prior to the amplification stage.
Re:Latency? (Score:3, Interesting)
My only landline is a VOIP service from my cable provider (Net, from Brazil). There are some downsides (like the fact that the line goes down when the power does, or the time it takes from the moment you switch on the adapter to actually getting a dial tone, which is a problem when you return home from a trip), but I've NEVER experienced a voice delay. YMMV, of course, but Net allocate a fixed bandwidth to the voice service above the amount you have for your Internet connection; and they give voice a much higher QoS than regular traffic. The voice quality is as good as any other landline, if not better.
Re:Latency? (Score:3, Interesting)
HD Codecs not always "better" (Score:1, Interesting)
After a recent PBX upgrade that automatically enabled G.722, I was asked to disable it because the users perceived the call quality as being worse than G.711 and G.729. What I realized is the users were hearing higher frequencies and could also hear more background noise (think Sprint pin drop commercials) than before and were interpreting it all as a noisy connection. The response to the explanation of the situation was "Turn it off".
Bandwidth isn't today's biggest problem with calls (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't have an issue with the frequency range, but certainly do with latency, and the lack of true duplex any more!
I find (found) that talking on a true analog line is MUCH easier than any digital line today - be that Skype, cell phones, or even land lines in most countries. I'm always amazed when traveling abroad when I make a local call on a truly-analog system how much nicer the experience is!
With today's systems in "Westernized" countries, you can't even have an effective 2-way conversation. The duplex performance sucks - you can't hear anything while you're talking. Add to that a small but noticable delay, and you have to resort to long pauses between sentences to ensure you don't talk over one another.
Am I the only one that notices this? It's AWFUL compared to what it was like 20 years ago.
MadCow.
Re:POTS beats wireless (Score:3, Interesting)
.
Re:It's a real problem. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Bandwidth not Frequency (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually the bandwidth is 3.1kHz, running from 300Hz to 3.4kHz. This is the range of frequencies that conveys the most information relevant to intelligibility. Anything else makes it easier to recognise the speaker but doesn't make it easier to understand them and can make it harder to understand in noisy environments.
That's a myth, 3.4 kHz is not high enough to tell the "f" sound from the "s" sound over the phone. Similarly for "v" vs "z" and a bunch of others. If phones were that intelligible, people wouldn't have to say "a as in alpha, b as in bravo, ...".
Re:Bandwidth not Frequency (Score:2, Interesting)
You are absolutely correct. I worked for "Ma Bell" in the late 1970s. What you didn't mention was that in big cities, and some rural areas, some of the existing wire was laid down in the 1920s. The MAX DSL speed I can get to my house is 768 Kbits (down) because of these OLD wires. I live near, but not IN, downtown Chicago, IL. My neighborhood is one of the oldest surviving in Chicago.