[PLUG-TALK] Cell phone voice quality

[Galen Seitz]

On 01/19/17 05:29, Rich Shepard wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Jan 2017, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> 
>> Is it the phone or the signal provided by the carriers' equipment?
> 
> John,
> 
>    It's my understanding that both are factors. Tiny speaker/microphone often
> tucked away on the bottom or at an edge, atmospherics, distance from cell
> tower, etc. Perhaps the major factor is that smart phone designers put less
> emphasis on voice quality than image quality or the screen.

Keep in mind that the voice signal is digitized and then run through a
compression algorithm.  My guess is that this compression is one of the
primary reasons voice quality can be so bad.  Nonetheless, I'm still
amazed that a couple hundred people can turn on their phones at the end
of a flight and it all works.  Or that tens of thousands of people can
be in a stadium and all have service (of course, if they all tried to
make a call at the same time ...).

galen
-- 
Galen Seitz
galens at seitzassoc.com