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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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."

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.

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.

There's one more factor which is the configuration of QoS. This can be as easy as checking a box in a GUI for home routers. I've also spent days configuring Cisco switches, OpenBSD queues, VLANs, etc to achieve this.

>Asterisk (can be hosted in the cloud or in your home)

There's a FreePBX image that installs right on the Rasperry Pi, which some people just glue or tape to the back of their voip phone and plug right into one of the phone's ethernet ports. Clever solution for the price conscious voip customer. Toss in a $100 Yealink or Grandstream with a big color screen and off you go.

http://www.raspberry-asterisk.org/

But won't that fail at the same time your home internet access fails - when the ISP link goes down? I have a land line as a redundant link, for security.

At least on some Android phones, you can add a SIP account directly. That might be your cheapest-available handset.

Mine warns that more battery is consumed if receiving calls is enabled, but I only use it for making particular international calls.

Agreed on Google Voice, I used it all the way back to the Grand Central days and I wish it were maintained more. That being said, the Hangouts integration isn't that bad now. I know it feels risky to hit that 'merge to hangouts' button but I've been using it for a while without any huge inconveniences. The only problem I run in to is when I need to search for old SMS messages, the only way to do it after merging is by doing an 'in:chats searchterm' search in Gmail. That wouldn't even be so bad except that I also use Inbox and the search doesn't work in Inbox.

In theory I actually like the idea of having my SMS / Phone calls / emails / hangouts merged pretty tightly, but there are a lot of subtle ways that they could really screw up the user experience while making that happen so I'm still nervous about it.

Man, this site skews young! I just saw a smartwatch-related thread a couple of days ago, with half the comments indicating that no one wears a wristwatch. Today, no one has a home phone.

Forward-looking trends are what they are... but the overwhelming majority of the population is over 30. And that's the demographic with the overwhelming majority of income. Telephony is a pretty easy bolt-on for Google Fiber, especially since they already have the Google Voice infrastructure in place. So why wouldn't they?

E911 service is more reliable with a land line, even if it's VoIP, since the location is fixed. Some recommend having a line just for that.

It's not weird at all. A simple $10 a month home phone line can make or break the deal when trying to get a potential residential customer to switch to Google Fiber from an incumbent carrier. Also consider the number of younger people trying to get faster internet at their parents home so they can work/Netflix when they come visit, etc. This is a very smart play.

I still have a home phone, but it's an ObiTalk box that logs into my Google Voice account, so I don't pay anything for it. I actually prefer it over my cell phone because the call quality is much better.

> $10/month sounds like a high price point for such a feature.

As someone who is forced by my monopoly ISP (with collusion from my local gvmnt) to buy bundled basic phone service for an extra $30/month (if I want internet access, which I do, and for which I have to pay $87/month for 30/5), I say people in Google Fiber areas don't know how lucky they are.

Most of the 4-5 year olds I know of know exactly where mommy and daddy's iPhone is because when they're lucky they get to play games on it.

I think the major selling point is that you're not SOL if you need to be reached or call 911 while your cell is dead/left in the car/etc.

Not that it's an important enough point for me personally to have a land line, but I can understand why a lot of people would favor that. As a $10/month add-on for existing Fiber customers it's not a bad deal.

What? This is literally all about landlines. A minor feature is that you can redirect the landline service to your mobile phone, which is a feature that has been included in most landline services since mobile existed.

> Fiber Phone > Your home phone. On Google Fiber.

Those are the very first words you see when opening the page. It seems quite clear that they are referring to landlines.

The line between landlines and mobiles is blurring and the feature set described in the page reflects that.

My Nokia 208 dumbphone supports SIP over 3G, how is this new?

Bundling this with internet and cable is also a sneaky way to manipulate taxes.

I wonder if being a landline phone service provider makes it easier for them to get access to utility poles?

That's what Fi is for: https://fi.google.com

There are a number of MVNOs coming to market with data-only SIM cards and their own branded dialer apps. Some have free international data roaming.

It's all about the bundle. They need to be able to offer the so-called triple play that other ISPs do.

As I understand it, Fiber is run as if it were an independent company, trying to make a great product, and run at a profit.

Profit?