[StillBored]

POTS, is largely of varying service too. The switched network of old was mostly replaced by G.711 on TDM connections, which is probably an improvement for long distance. So at that point it was no longer strictly analog, but then the phone companies started shaving pennies and doing things like pair gain to cram more phone lines down the same wires, which was a fairly large reduction in line quality for local calls.

These days so much of it is routed over IP, which is where all the latency got added.

So, its hard to know what your "ranch" actually was.

OTOH, its hard for any hardwired system to be half as bad as your average cell phone which are dealing with constant channel quality issues, which results in the robot voice (for lack of a better description), and all the broken up audio, or simply silence that one frequently gets from a cell phone. Basically cell phones suck for actually talking to people. <shrug> But once again, convenience trumps quality.