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Stop using legacy mobile audio, especially for conference calls. There are better alternatives. You’re doing your customers and colleagues a disservice by using mobile audio. It’s time we moved on. PSTN is not much better either – switch to VoIP, and give your ears a break from crappy audio connections.
Refresher: Audio Quality Standards
There are many different methods of encoding speech for transmission across networks. There are trade-offs with each, balancing bandwidth, voice quality, and endpoint requirements. The interesting point is that there is not a direct relationship between bandwidth and quality. Half the bandwidth does not have to mean half the quality.
The Mean opinion score test provides a way of ‘scoring’ the quality of a call. 1 is Bad, 5 is Excellent. G.711 encoding has a score of 4.1, which is very good quality, but uses 64kbps per call. GSM has a score of 3.5, which is the minimum acceptable level…but it only uses 12.2kbps. Pretty good tradeoff if you’re in a bandwidth-constrained environment.
But we’re no longer constrained by bandwidth. We don’t need to squeeze that audio call down to only a few kbps. We can use other options such as FaceTime, Continue reading