[icedchai]

More like it de-materialized. Unless there was a physical line problem, regular old phone calls over copper lines ("POTS") worked well. They were circuit switched, not packet switched. You essentially had a dedicated path provisioned, end to end. Today, POTS is all but gone. Almost nobody has a real landline. Most phone calls are transported over IP. I converted my landline to VOIP almost a decade ago. It's fine.

[mceachen]

I feel like people are misremembering POTS voice quality--it's roughly equivalent to AM radio.

POTS truncates to 300–3,300 Hz and downsamples to 8kHz (if it goes through a digital switch, which it has for 50+ years)

The improvement with "HD Voice" on 4G cellular networks 10+ years ago was stark and welcome.

[icedchai]

You are right, but at least the quality was reliably poor! Today, you'll spend several minutes ask someone to fix their microphone. Eventually they realize it's not even connected to their computer.