Doug Freyburger > wrote:

>Land lines just plain work but they are wired to a spot and they care
>about area codes.

>Cell phone ___ words and ___ces of words and {pop} they add noises.
>Often they randomly hang up for no apparent reason without so much as a
>vibrate to point out to you that the screen pressed against your ear
>suddenly displays "Call ended" in a way that your ear can't see. Are
>there folks out there with ears that can see to be able to tell when
>your call just got dropped or do folsk redial every few calls without
>noticing? The things may as well be walkie talkies for the quality of
>the sound on them.

This is all true but it's not inherent to cell phones vs. land line
phones. Instead, it has to do with history and monopolies.

In the beginning, Bell Telephone operated the land line system, had
no competitors, and established standards for what they called "toll
quality" performance. Roughly speaking, this meant a passband up
to 3 KHz, with a 26 dB signal-to-noise ratio, and an availability
of 999 days out of 1000. (Back then, the average outage was a day
in length.)

When mobile telephony was first being devised, many of the players
pushed for mobile phones of the same performance -- "toll quality".
In fact, the first two generations (AMPS and GSM) were pretty much
toll quality, but starting with CDMA the quality went drastically down,
at least under conditions of worst-case reception and high loads
(e.g. many handsets trying to communicate with the same tower).
At the same time, the monopolies were broken down and so economy
prevailed over quality.

It has now come full circle, with the cheapest landline services being
just as bad voice quality as the worst cellphones.

In short, they don't make 'em like they used to.

Steve