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by pak 3839 days ago
It's the combination of wireless packets dropping and the audio having to be degraded to 8bit/8kHz to pass between carriers that really brings on the terrible. It's kind of like TCP over TCP [1] -- works well enough a lot of the time, but when it fails, it fails badly because of how the two layers aren't really built for each other.

[1]: http://sites.inka.de/bigred/devel/tcp-tcp.html

2 comments

POTS lines do not carry more audio bandwidth than a cell phone. All of them are 64kbit PCM uncompressed audio.
Ah, ok, that makes more sense.