Think this will improve, or will the increasing amount of users and traffic overwhelm any technical improvements? ...
I think the delays are far longer than people realize. To measure the delay, have the person count slowly together with you: 1,2,3... With this technique I've found the delay to be usually around 1 second.
There are technologies available today (and in limited use), which allow much better sound quality ...Personally I do use it every day and like it a lot, as our company phones default to wide band, falling back to narrow-band if bandwidth is not available.
Is there any way that I could say "Well, today I'd like to talk to my daughter using high-quality audio," and do it, even if it cost more?
There should be, and I'd also like to hear about it. There are many things that could be done using the internet (I think we are pretty locked in on cell/landline calls - but I seem to remember seeing a bandwidth setting on a phone once in the early days of digital - those are probably locked out these days). Most internet connections are fast enough to handle a higher bandwidth and less compressed signal. That should not be a problem for most internet connections. As an example, we can do video & audio on SKYPE (or others), let me use ALL of that for the audio when I want.
A [-]word[/-] paragraph or two on those delays - as I understand it, they are due to two (related) components.
1) Cell and VOIP phones take a sample of your voice over a burst of time (let's just say 1/10 of a second for this explanation). Your phone has to store that 0.1 sec sample and then analyze it and create a compressed version of it. So it already has a minimum 0.1 sec delay, as it had to wait for the whole thing in order to run its compression algorithm. Then it takes some amount of time to compress it. Then, it has to send that 0.1 sec 'packet', and it takes some time to get to its destination. Then... the receiving end has to decode that 'packet' into a .1 sec burst of sound, and finally.... play that sound back on the receiver. And while this is happening, each side needs to be working on encoding the following .1 sec burst of audio in parallel,
So, you always have a delay of at least the "sample packet" time length, plus encoding, transfer and decoding. Quite a bit to ask from these little devices.
2) Jitter - this is the nasty part for internet phone calls. It turns out (again, as I understand this), that .1 second sound sample gets split into a bunch of data packets over the internet. And each packet can take a different route (and they often do). And some packets will take longer to get there, or even get lost and be asked to re-transmit. Now, you don't notice this on a web page so much, if it takes two seconds to load, you don't often care that one section loaded before another - you mainly care about the final finished page you read. But with voice, it doesn't work that way - you can't 'read' a voice if the bits are out of order. So, the decoder has to wait for ALL the bits to get there, at some point, it gives up and does the best it can with what it gt. This is where you get drop offs and other artifacts.
Whew.... Bottom line - with a reasonably high speed, low jitter connection, yes, you should be able to specify a high quality sound. It is technically feasible, whether it is available or not I do not know. Thinking about what I just wrote, it may help to trade off delay for audio quality. That may or may not be a good trade off, but you can adapt to the delay, poor sound and drop outs are harder to adapt to.
But, to answer your question... I do not think it will get any better... the reason I say is our company has hold music... and we had the guy out here to check the system because it sounds so bad to so many people...
Music on hold, or any other "constant" sound is really challenging for digital phone systems that were designed primarily for human voices.
I'm amazed that companies have not caught on to this - music really does sound absolutely awful over these compressions schemes. They should drop the music, or maybe find some types (simple tones maybe?) that sound OK compressed. It really adds to the annoyance of being on hold.
Sound quality on landlines has deteriorated and cell phones have always been bad. I don't think either will improve, as it's just not that important to most folks--the sound quality/pseudo half-duplex operation, etc are acceptable and they are not willing to pay a higher price for better sound.
I think it will improve.
Eventually, there won't be any such thing as analog voice calls; everything will be digital.
Just as the digital conversion of analog music gave us CDs with better quality than the old analog vinyl records, the same thing will happen with phones.
braumeister, I have to go with samclem on this. while CDs were a big improvement in many ways (I will also refrain from the vinyl-vs-CD debate), look what has happened - despite all the technology improvements we have had since the 80's, people buy music in compressed formats. Convenience/cost over quality. So no, I don't think it'll get better. Too may people are 'perfectly happy' with junk, and often-times the majority rules and the marketplace is filled with junk.
Well, I know for a fact that analog computers are more responsive and more accurate that the best digital computers will ever will be. But when you apply the "does it matter?" test, digital might be as good as analog.
It's not so much the technology, it is the
implementation[ of the technology. There is good & bad analog, and there is good & bad digital.
And I agree with many that we ought to have the option of better sound when we want it, charge me for it if you must, but give me the option.
-ERD50
