Why, exactly, do cell-phone calls often sound crappy? Jerry Gibson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies wireless networks, says that at the network level there are a number of reasons. You simply might not have good signal reception, and even if you do, the base station closest to you is probably considering all kinds of factors—the load on the cell site, the time of day, and network use projections—in order to decide how to allocate bandwidth for your call.
To improve sound quality, wireless carriers have been upgrading their networks to support technologies often referred to as HD voice or wideband audio. While old telephone and cell-phone networks cut out some of the high and low frequencies in voice calls, wideband audio includes a wider range of frequencies to make calls sound better, letting you hear more high and low tones. In the United States, Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and T-Mobile use VoLTE, or voice over LTE, to send audio atop their fast LTE networks. Sprint currently offers advanced voice service over its 3G network, though Ron Marquardt, Sprint’s vice president of technology innovation and architecture, says a move to VoLTE is inevitable.
Faster, please.