[tumblewit]

makes me realise the internet is so powerful that the idea of 'voice calling' has now completely changed to 'data exchanging' devices. I mean if you think about it cellular will soon lose its 'cell' meaning. The idea of phone numbers might not go away but everything will likely be IP based which means it doesn't matter how your packets are routed technically.

[giantrobot]

Why would cellular lose its "cell" meaning? The radios are still cellular which means a small geographic space in served by a particular directional physical antenna(s).

Your phone only needs to be able to hit the antenna in its cell. It doesn't need to talk to other phones or more distant antennas. This is what allows phones have have relatively low power radios that reside in your pocket without big external antennas.

[867-5309]

TIL "cellular" refers to the imagined interconnecting shapes when mapped, not the battery technology as previously thought. unsure why this term was popularised over the pre-existing "mobile" but there we go

[giantrobot]

Way, way, way back in the day there was Mobile Telephone Service [0]. Instead of a cellular network it was just a two-way VHF radio. MTS was operator dialed which meant you picked up your end in the car and an operator dialed a landline and patched it through to the radio. When cellular phones debuted in the 80s they were described as such to distinguish them from MTS phones.

The MTS phones needed a whole channel assigned to a phone which was dedicated in the whole service area. Cellular systems allowed geographic channel reuse so you could have a lot more users in a given area.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Telephone_Service

[kzrdude]

I think that we should just use the word "phone" from now on, we don't need to say "cell" or "cell phone", this is the just the phone. Even though it has a lot more jobs as a smartphone, messaging and communication generally is still the main job.

[teeray]

This has already happened in LTE--everything is packet-based and any traditional "telephone" things are provided as a service (from a system call the IP Multimedia Subsystem) on top of that. IIRC, 3G networks were the last to make some distinction between packets and voice circuits.

[hypertele-Xii]

I've yet to see any voice chat app work as well as cellular calls. Until then, it's still a phone with a computer attached.

[vel0city]

Don't worry, pretty soon the reliability of standard calls will be roughly the same as most good voice chat apps with the switch for all carriers to implement VoLTE. Maybe still a little more reliable as it won't directly rely on the public internet, but overall still a SIP/IP-based VoIP system as opposed to the dedicated call channels which were the standard previously.

[neurostimulant]

Pretty sure it's due to voice chat apps only has a handful of centralized servers, resulting in more hops, higher latency and worse experience while your telcos has edge servers spread out allowing lower latency voice call between customers in the same geographical areas.