Why Can't We Have HD Audio and SIP on the 4 Major US Carriers?

3 points by trome 9 years ago | 4 comments

So, why can't we have HD Audio? We know T-Mobile has SIP servers that play nice with others[1] when they aren't walled off, Sprint supports SIP as that is how RingPlus (which supported G722 HD Audio), Google Voice, Bandwidth.com and others tie in, AT&T offered nearly the same type of interconnection with their WebRTC developer offering they killed a month ago, and Verizon has been showing the SIP URI as of late too[2].

Wouldn't it be possible to get the IPSec cert off a few phones and get access to these PBXes/SBCs, so we can get decent quality audio? As it stands today, carriers are essentially driving away their customers with low quality G711 audio or worse, no one is benefiting from high bitrate, low quality audio.

1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/2y4glg/calling_tmobile_subscribers_directly_via_sip/ 2 - https://www.reddit.com/r/verizon/comments/2y7nrd/is_it_possible_to_call_verizon_subscribers_with/

PaulHoule 9 years ago |

The big one is that cell phone providers aren't that interested in telephony these days.

I did an extended stint of B2B sales over the phone and I can say that cell phones have made life much worse for anybody who talks over the phone. You discover that people in "normal" built-up places like Encino, CA are making calls on their cells with constant dropouts. Or that you can't get a GSM signal two blocks from the intersection of Hollywood and Vine, or you might even be unlucky enough to be on a conference call that is interrupted by a car crash. (It happened to me!)

Any criticism of the cell phone culture will get you voted down, after all, almost every article in a lifestyle publication leads with some reference to how attached we are our to "our" smartphones but the fact is that people are flapping their lips constantly but not all that concerned about understanding what the other people say, otherwise they'd ditch their cells for a real phone.

B2B sales over the phone can vary across the board from tedious to nerve-wracking to a lot of fun, but if you can't hear what people are saying, and they can't hear now, it is much harder. If B2B sales matter at all to the economy I'd imagine that cell phones are knocking a few percent off our GDP.

trome 9 years ago | |

Cell phones definitely have caused a notable drop in audio quality. Massive carriers like Verizon for example felt they could compress calls quite heavily, destroying audio quality in the process.

VoLTE could improve the situation, if we could get the HD audio to actually make it off the cell carrier's network. Currently, no US Cell Carrier does so tho.

PaulHoule 9 years ago | | |

In Europe, the coming of cell phones brought lower phone bills and better service. I spent 1998 and 1999 in the former East Germany and found it was a mistake to get a landline from Deusche Telecom and I should have just gotten a "handy" instead but I grew up in a country that had a regulated monopoly telecom (AT&T) as opposed to a government- or post-office- run phone company. In Europe, cell phones brought competition and lower prices.

In the US, on the other hand, phone bills went up as cell phones came in, and the quality of the service went way down.