On Mon, 31 Mar 2008 01:37:29 +0000, Jay Honeck wrote:
Hey, I had a "bag phone" just like that one in your photo gallery,
bolted to the floor of my van!

They may have been primitive by today's standards, but I'll tell you
what: The sound quality was a thousand times better than the digital
crap we have nowadays.

When the signal was strong, I agree. But after driving around a bit with
that phone I was reminded of how crappy analog communications can be with
a marginal signal.

The earliest CDMA digital phones sounded great, but that's because they
used 13Kb vocoders. The reason the latest phones sound worse is because
they're using 8Kb vocoders -- they're trying to represent the human voice
with less data. It's the equivalent of sampling an MP3 at 64Kbps vs.
256Kbps. It just doesn't sound the same. Blame the carriers and their
penny pinching.

The good news is that at least one of the largest providers (Verizon) is
planning to dump the proprietary CDMA phones, transform their networks
into a mobile equivalent of the Internet and allow everyone to operate
whatever hardware devices they want to bring to the party. Presumably
this would allow the use of higher bitrate vocoders and a return to
better audio fidelity...kind of like what Vonage has done for Plain Old
Telephone Service (POTS).

But change like that takes years. Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Doug
http://www.dvatp.com/