Sure. Because so many people are using cell phones these days. As a result, you have a lot of poor reception/dropped calls/etc. that would have been unheard of in the days of the Bell system much less newer fiber optic networks. In many things (see also music listening to a large degree) we've regressed considerably in quality to buy convenience.

Yes, it's all shitty low bandwidth mobile phone voice codecs or VOIP stuff. Good old digital trunk lines (8 bit 8 ksample/sec mu-law -- the same as the .au file encoding, I think) sounded really quite good.