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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

A landline phone service seems a bit anachronistic, but there is a place for it. The future of telephony is here, but it sucks. Many here on HN probably don't even remember this, but phone calls actually used to be intelligible. Before cell phones and VOIP, before packet-switching and aggressive digital compression, calls traveled over Ma Bell's glorious circuit-switched network. You could actually understand what people on a conference call were saying, instead of every other word dropping into the digital aether.

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Worse yet, you could talk at the same time as the other person! Carrying on a conversation with my mom is like talking at that fancy riot mike from a few years ago [0]. If you don't have a perfectly negotiated rhythm, you're gonna talk over the other person, cutting them off, missing part of their sentence, and then begin a flood of repeat/acks before starting again. It's bloody idiotic, and my mom is convinced she's just terrible at talking to people, when instead for the first time in her life the phone is too dumb to do the job right; she thinks she's terrible with tech, and it's really just dumb machines failing her expectations.

And never mind the loss of fidelity so you can't tell someone's tone or not.

Almost makes me wanna just chuck this miracle slab of supercomputing glass. plonk

[0] Seems like it's called the Delayed Auditory Feedback effect. Some researchers built a directional mike/megaphone combo that basically stupefies anyone it's pointed at into silence.

I agree that latency causes people to cut each other off. But I've not found fidelity to be a problem. FaceTime, Skype and WeChat voice fidelity beats POTS for me.

FaceTime is the best.

This is crazy, because I'm pretty much too young to remember a time when phones ever sounded good. The reason I prefer text to call isn't because I don't like to talk to people - I've just always found call quality to be utterly trash. Maybe this is part of the reason the younger generations prefer texting.

The superior sound of vinyl is making a comeback as it is 'discovered' by a younger generation.

Can landline's be that far behind?

True, a lot of my friend have vinyl now. It's fun to listen to, generally more social. You can make a thing out of listening to vinyl much more easily than you can by playing music off your laptop speakers.

What if you hook your laptop up to the same speakers that you hook your record player up to?

You're not actively shuffling through a box full of tangible objects to find what to listen to.

If you care about audio fidelity, as opposed to the "vinyl-ness" of the sound, vinyl is worse:

http://www.mcelhearn.com/do-vinyl-records-sound-better-than-...

http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_%28Vinyl%29

Obviously, if you want the most vinyl sound around, vinyl is the only way to get that. However, if you want maximum fidelity to the original audio source, vinyl has inherent limitations later formats do not.

True, but those limitations made it so, you had to have a decent mixing engineer do the mixing job. Nowadays, many CDs (which are supposed to be non-compressed) are actually crap mixed.

I'm more than olde enough to remember, but, actually, I've found call quality to be substantially better since all-digital was the norm, with the exception being when one endpoint or the other is doing something weird. What I remember from the days you are romanticizing is a palpable reduction in quality for long-distance calls, with even local calls having, often, worse quality than most calls do now.

Nope. We still have old-school landline here (they won't be terminated for a few years yet). I just did a test, and the difference is huge. Landline 1 - Smartphone 0.

Also the landline works even when the power line shut down, because it has it's own seperate power network.

You could also have a conversation in real time, and not delayed by a second. Cell phone delay has made it impossible for me to carry on a meaningful conversation with anyone.

There's also value in having a phone number for a house or a family, separate from phone numbers of individual people. I don't want my utility company or my cable company having my cell number. But I'm not the only person that can make decisions about anything we might need to talk to them about anyway. The house number reaches both my wife and me. Cell #s can't do that.

This is why I keep a voip line as a home phone, with voicemails being forwarded to both myself and the wife. Very few select people get our actual cell numbers. All businesses, etc just get the home line number.

Exactly! We've got kids and our local school district likes to send robo-calls to remind people of events. Also the dentists and doctors are calling the day before with a reminder and that's automated for 2 out of 3 (dentist and doctor yes, orthodontist (ouch), no).

I imagine you don't make many international calls.

A google voice number that gets forwarded to both your cell phones? I'm pretty sure that can be set up. Not trying to be snarky, I do see your point, especially for a business where you want an office number that isn't somebody's cell phone.

>Before cell phones and VOIP

My wife and I both have cell phones that support T-mobile's HD Voice and its incredible how good our calls sound now. At work, the PBX system I deployed uses plain jane G7.11 ulaw and it sounds good, as good as the old system because ulaw is designed to replicate POTS quality. We also have the option to use G7.22 wideband, but I just never bothered (this wouldnt work on the POTS system so we'd transcode back to ulaw anyway for non-internal calls).

I have the opposite experience than you it seems. I grew up with POTS phone service and it certainly sounded fine, but towards the end everyone had cordless phones that universally sounded terrible. If anything, sound quality is pretty good nowadays on average. Of course, overly compressed audio will never sound good, but bandwidth costs being what they are, there's no excuse to be using anything worse sounding than ulaw.

Lastly, have you used a POTS line or a non-voip PBX lately? I find them to be noisy and scratchy. I'm so used to clean audio that when I have to use a (mostly) analog/PRI transport it really does sound terrible to me. All that background static noise is just distracting now that I'm not used to it. The same way I really can't listen to records or tape players or tolerate SDTV. I suspect there's an element of nostalgia here with the old POTS system.

It's a shame that a lot of this innovation, while radically increasing flexibility and dropping cost, has degraded call quality.

On the other hand, calls between certain compatible LTE handsets (AT&T calls this "HD Audio" in my market) sound far better than classic landlines ever did. Ditto for good Skype calls and Facetime Audio.

Facetime Audio is great. Very big difference compared to a regular cell phone call.

With iOS 9.3 you can set WiFi calling as the default (when wifi is available).

Didn’t know that. Neat :)

> AT&T calls this "HD Audio"

I believe the generic term is VoLTE - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_LTE

Not really. VoLTE is Voice over LTE[1], which most likely implements HD voice (wideband audio[2],) however, with carrier and device support HD voice could be done over 3G and 2G networks as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_LTE

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wideband_audio

VoLTE will actually soon feature Enhanced Voice Services (EVS), or Full-HD Voice, which is a vast improvement over "regular" HD Voice.

EVS is supposedly transparent and full-band. http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/standards/full-hd-voice-wil...

VoLTE is great -- I use it on Verizon. But at least with Verizon it is turned off by default and most people don't seem to turn it on. It is turned off by default because LTE coverage is not as complete as the legacy 3G coverage (yet).

Facebook audio as others have pointed out is great.

T-Mobile had it from 2013 and earlier (they got the iPhone5 in 2013 and it supported HD Voice). Call quality can be like a clear Skype.

There are good quality codecs available that use less bandwidth and have better quality than traditional phone calls, but they are encumbered by patents and license fees. Most people just care about getting a service cheaply/free rather than the actual quality, so most providers will just use the G711 (what landline phones use for trunking) or GSM codecs which are free to use. G722.2 (AMR-WB or "HD Audio") provides a better quality at less than half the bandwidth of G711, but it isn't free to use so very few providers support it.

Not only that, but the codec needs to be supported at all stages of the call (the phones, the VOIP server, the trunk if external, etc), and if not it'll need to be re-encoded, which uses more CPU and reduces the call quality. As such you are probably better off just sticking with a more common, lower quality, codec. It's a chicken and the egg problem as providers won't support more codecs until hardware does and vice-versa (Twilio's SIP trunking service only supports G711, which is kind of the lowest-of-the-low).

It's amazing to remember how crystal clear phone calls used to be. I wonder if there's a niche for the first service willing to use more bytes and sacrifice efficiency in the name of analog-era call quality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wideband_audio

and more specific to cellular phones:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_Wideband

Search for "HD Voice" from the big cellular companies in the US. It usually requires handset support.

It is correct that both parties need this for better quality?

It is, yes (and both possibly need to be on the same network - at least, I know this is the case for Verizon's HD calling).

I believe apple has supported this with the iPhone for several years now.

As has Android, but AT&T and Verizon tend to lock out features like HD Voice and Wifi Calling to be iPhone only.

T-Mobile is what I have. I think they were the first? But it sounds great on T-Mobile. I usually just talk to the wife both of us on iPhones and T-Mobile. And then I get the occasional call from someone else and I am like "What the !@# get a decent connection/phone/whatever!"

Frankly I doubt it. With Facebook, Skype, whatsapp etc all offering free, high quality calling, it's more likely for it to fade away than be replaced by a higher quality product.

What you are calling "analog-era call quality" was likely mostly digital call quality, with only the local loop being analog. Before digital carrier facilities and switches like 4ESS, 5ESS, etc. became ubiquitous on the PSTN, there was plenty of analog noise on local and long distance calls, as well as delays, echo, crosstalk, and other artifacts. I remember a marked improvement in voice call quality throughout the 1980's. I believe wireless voice quality will increase organically as the bandwidth available for wireless digital services grows.

But telephony has always been band-limited to 3 kHz, even in the 'good old days' of analog lines. Voice quality over a transatlantic link compounded that with delays, static and fading. If you needed high quality audio over the phone system, it _was_ possible to book a 'music line' for things like outside broadcasts that did not have the aggressive filtering, though.

Also anyone over 60 or so (super generalization) wants a landline. For evidence I give you my mother, my in-laws, and several parents of friends. Said friends, like me, would switch their parents to Google Fiber in a hot minute with or without their consent. So a landline offering makes sense, as without it, there's a sticking point. This helps make it more frictionless.

> Also anyone over 60 or so (super generalization) wants a landline.

It is a super generalization, as you say, but I question the accuracy. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I don't know that you're right. For opposing anecdata, I present my parents who recently gave up their landline while in their 70s. Granted, Mom was debugging IBM 370 core dumps before you were (likely) born, but there ya go. What I have not done is survey their friends and neighbors, or if they're are an anomaly.

However, one thing that might push even the elderly to getting rid of the landline is phone spam. It's the reason my parents gave me. Granted, cell phones aren't immune, but they are more protected.

Me, 60 isn't that far off, but we gave up our land line years ago. But I'm also commenting on HN. :-)

I think it's more of a network effect. That phone number has been given out for years, and all their friends and family have it. They'd have to get a second cell phone or use a service like Google Voice to make use of it beyond a landline, so it's logistically easier to just keep it as a landline number.

I think most people in their 60's will be long gone before they have a chance to buy cheap gigabit fiber with phone service (whether from Google or another provider).

Yes would be nice to see Google support G.722 on this service...

I do think Google has other motivations here:

+ More "data" to train their speech to text and AI algorithms on?

+ Another UI for home automation...call your number to tell your home IoT device to do x...and enable the devices to call out?

+ Residential now...SMB and enterprise next?

+ More ads...future pricing..."free" but you listed to Google ads before/after conversations?

Anyone know if Google needs to be a FCC licensed carrier to offer the E911 service? Seems grey. If so, maybe that's why only certain markets?

All fixed VoIP providers must offer E911. I don't think they would have the option of not providing it. I don't know the exact rules, but I've worked for several small ISPs that offered white labelled Voice products and we always had to carefully maintain our address directories for E911 service, and customers were not allowed to opt out. (For example if the only address we had on file for a customer was a PO box, we had to get a street address in order to sell them the VoIP product.)

IANAL but I do ISP compliance paperwork ~14 days out of the year...

Seems like Google could trip over the CPNI rules if they were using call data for AI training etc. Certainly if it somehow ended up used "for advertising purposes".

It's not so much FCC licensed as FCC reporting (Form 499, etc), though many states require some form of carrier licensing. In any case, Google's already had to jump through those hoops for Project Fi. E.g. if you search `"Google North America Inc." public` you should see a ton of filings about that.

SMB/Enterprise would be a interesting market for Google. That's a relatively high-touch market and I suspect they'd run into the same objections as Google's public cloud offerings with regards to support and hand-holding. POTS replacement (or even end-user cell service) is fairly low-touch & automatable by comparison.

The sad thing is it isn't circuit switched networks or analog transmission that makes for call quality. There is no technical reason a cell phone can't have good audio quality. They just don't, because garbage-quality audio hardware and extreme lossy compression save a marginal amount of money.

I wonder why they can't fix the caller id problem? Why is it so easy for telemarketers to use fake information? I've basically moved to a telephone whitelist -- if you aren't in my contacts list, you are going straight to voicemail.

"I wonder why they can't fix the caller id problem?"

SMTP is much newer than the phone system. We haven't solved the problem of fake emails, because there's no way to get every mail domain and server to fully support DMARC and SPF.

Now, imagine the same problem, but with a load of old analogue equipment. That's why there's no clear path to secure caller ID.

Do you remember the long distance charges as well? We all owe MCI and their microwave towers - without that pressure Ma Bell would still being excusing their insane pricing with "Its this or pneumatic tubes."

Long distance charges are still the norm in Canada...

I remember. I don't remember the quality difference being as stark as you suggest, but maybe it was. This offering from Google is VoIP as well though, right? I think a decent VoIP call's quality is still better than the average cell phone call, but that's not why I'd want this - I just find it convenient occasionally (maybe occasionally enough to justify $10/mo) to have a phone hanging on the wall. Something the babysitter can use reliably, for example.

I can easily experience this today by calling over wifi+Whatsapp instead of making a regular call. You'd think that the network specialized to telephones would have superior quality, but I've never experienced that.

You still can. My grandma phone, whith the dialing wheel and twisted wire, still works in France. And the sound is much, much better than on my 4G smartphone.

We have been fighting for net neutrality for good reason market reasons, but it works against phone quality when VOIP in the internet.

I was just in Australia and was blown away at the great quality of cellular phone calls. I thought I was on Viber.

I remember getting my first cell phone back in the late 90s and hating it for anything other than texts. I used to do conference calling, long conversations on the phone with friends and family but the cell phone ruined it with asynchronous communication. A few years later I was in Bangkok and called my parents with the phone I brought from the US, crystal clear, latency free, it was amazing, it literally was the best cell phone call I had ever had to this day. I don't have an iphone but iphone calls seem to be pretty good so maybe I just need to get over myself and get an iphone for the quality?

Blame your carrier. Wideband codecs on LTE should make things better.

This is complete tin-foil-hat territory, but I am going to say it anyway.

I used to travel internationally a fair bit to rural areas of SE Asia...

Places without wifi and cell.

I did feel different. I have no way to prove it was anything but placebo/mind -- but I did notice it.

Would be wonderful to see a study on this, even if to prove me a loon... but per your comment; I dont mind having a fully wired setup as opposed to all wireless - I'd love to see if there is any validity to this feeling.

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