[thaumasiotes]

> Neither? It's however the voice is encoded over the cell network. Again, I don't understand why because there's more than enough signal to stream digital audio.

Something's gone badly wrong in your memory; landline phones intentionally drop important vocal frequencies and automatically prevent everyone from sounding like themselves. Cell phones don't do that and have always had much, much, much better audio than landlines.

[hinkley]

It's why 24.4 kbps is about the max you can get from a modem without your phone line being a fancy one. Compression (in the musical sense not the Information Theory sense, though they overlap)