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Carrier Services
Deterioration of telephone quality
Has the focus on IP voice driven telcos to dumb down POTS?
by A. Michael Noll
Over the past decades, considerable effort and accomplishments were made in improving the technical quality of telephone service: less noise and distortion, increased intelligibility, fewer disconnects. But today quality has deteriorated — perhaps as a result of mass-market technologies.
Telecom engineers worked hard over the history of telephone service to improve the intelligibility of telephone calls and also other technical aspects of quality. Clipping and other distortion were reduced, noise was reduced, echo was eliminated, and call completions were increased.
But today network quality appears to de deteriorating. Disconnects, dropouts, and unintelligible speech occur frequently, particularly with cellular wireless service. Voice over the Internet suffers from latency, echo, noise, and dropouts.
Some might claim that the Plain-Old-Telephone-Service (POTS) network was over-designed in terms of quality, possibly being too good. I do not think so, since for me, I want to be able to understand the person talking with me over the telephone and I do not want the call to be disconnected in its middle.
Cellular calls use compression technology that reduces the quality but conserves precious wireless bandwidth. Internet telephony likewise uses compression with similar issues in terms of quality. But many quality problems are created when one compressed caller is connected to another compressed caller.
In the past, the FCC concerned itself with network quality, but today seems more concerned with other issues. It seems that today no one is monitoring network quality or imposing standards. Perhaps decreases in quality are just another cost of competition and of more choice for consumers. Or will consumers finally tire of lost calls, disconnects, echo, noise, and poor intelligibility and again demand quality telephone service.
A regular contributior to Telecom Engine, A. Michael Noll is Professor Emeritus of Communications at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.
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