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Comment by vel0city | Hacker News Reader

Opus is the de facto codec for phone applications, other than you know, the publicly switched telephone network which is still mostly stuck on G.711 and only finally rolling out "HD Voice" G.722.

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If you have a G.722 capable voip desk phone or softphone on your own asterisk system, where G.722 calls work between any two extensions on your system, and you are making calls into the regular PSTN... It is almost certainly ending up as G.711 anyways if you're calling another carrier.

Particularly if you are using a SIP trunking service to reach any international destinations outside of the US50 states and Canada, it's going to be regular G.711 alaw or ulaw.

If the device manufacturers could get their shit together and come up with some cross-manufacturer federated standard, we could easily dump the public telephony network once and for all. I’ve never been anywhere (rural or urban) where public telephone was better quality than some kind of VoIP. Even out in the boonies, data is usually more reliable than voice (at least with google fi).

The craziest thing is its not even really the device manufacturers, its usually the networks themselves. I've had SIP phones capable of good quality codecs for a long time but getting a carrier to actually support them and have a handshake actually complete with those is nearly impossible. My handshakes out always signal I'm Opus capable (along with a lot of other codecs) but almost every call in and out of my phone system is G.711. Calls internally sound wonderful though :)

I dont know why but I never had much good experience with VoIP on the street. VoLTE with EVS [1] has been superb.

[1] I think they are called HD Voice+ in some market.

G722 was also available on some ISDN phones in the 80ies.

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