Back in the late 1980s I was working with some folks who were testing voice quality over cell phones. In order to make them work efficiently it needed some for of compression. For almost 100 years voice quality was always key. But then came digital cell phone, 2nd generation, and fully digitized voice. Voice quality degraded. Then in the late 1990s I deployed IP voice on a massive scale. I tried to consider quality. But the problem was each carriers had different voice codecs and thus degradation was just compounded.
Now in the mid 2020s it has become horrible, Between multiple disparate voice codecs we have customer care centers shifting calls about all over the globe. Add to that the generally gross incompetence of the service people one ends up talking into a tin can.
This effect tells us a great deal about our current society, technology driven in and quality chased out.
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