Voice Quality Feature

There is, in fact, a basic design problem with cell phones, as industry observer Lee Gomes noted recently.

"Even under the best of circumstances, these phones don't do a very good job of the most basic thing we buy them to do -- make phone calls."

From one call to the next, Gomes notes, "one never knows what a phone call is going to sound like. Think of this as the real form of chat roulette. In fact, it is not uncommon for phone conversations these days to begin with a meta-discussion of the sound quality of the connection."

Part of the problem, paradoxically enough, is that there is no phone monopoly anymore. (Note to under-30s: Ask Mom and Dad about the AT&T (News - Alert) phone monopoly. Chances are they'll look back on it with a certain wistful nostalgia.) As Gomes correctly points out, there are advantages to having many players in the market, but there are also many places to point fingers for sucky call quality. Nobody owns the whole conversation.

"It's hard to know the weak link in any given phone conversation, and thus have someone to complain to when a conversation devolves into echoes and static," Gomes points out.

There are some hopeful signs. PCWorld's Tony Bradley recently pointed out that 4G might be an improvement: "With 4G looming on the horizon, can we look forward to better voice quality?"

Plus you can look at vendors such as Ooma, with their Telo home phone system. As TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) explains, "Ooma offers a wire speed router so customers can put the device as the root of their network without slowing down their Internet access. This allows them to guarantee that voice traffic receives adequate priority to avoid any voice quality problems when your home network is busy."

It's not that the technology's so complicated, voice doesn't take much bandwidth. It's simply that no one entity can be held to blame for low quality voice: "Ownership of telecommunications infrastructure is now so fragmented among handset makers, network operators, backbone providers and the rest that it's impossible for any single person, Steve Jobs (News - Alert) included, to get up on stage and promise that their phones will provide A+ quality no matter who is being called."

4G networks "should improve voice quality to some degree even if the carrier puts most of its network resources behind data service," Bradley says. "For example, if the high bandwidth demands of broadband data are allocated to the emerging 4G network, the 3G network is freed up to support voice. The increased capacity will lead to clearer, more stable voice calls that don't have to compete with data service for bandwidth."

We shall see.