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Elgan: iPhone, schmyphone, I just want better call quality

Elgan: iPhone, schmyphone, I just want better call quality

Phones have improved radically in the past 10 years, but have calls?

One of the supreme ironies of gadget enthusiasm is that the better a technology gets, the less exciting it becomes. Take the iPhone. Please! The 1.0 “Jesus Phone” release last year — a deeply flawed, slow, buggy, feature-limited phone with few applications — caused aneurysm and rapture.

Today, the new iPhone ships, and it’s everything the original wasn’t. It’s fast, capable and loaded with features and improved by vastly better firmware. Yawn!

(The App Store is the best part of Apple’s announcement today, but the 3G iPhone itself ranks as “ho-hum” on the excitement meter.)

The quality of smart phones has improved radically. At the beginning of last year, phone features like 3G, Wi-Fi, GPS, high-quality touch-screens, voice-recognition and high-quality cameras were rare, expensive and very “high end.” Today, they’re standard equipment, and can be had in a wide range of cheap phones. Like the iPhone, for example, now starting at $199.

That dramatic shift has taken place in the past year and a half. But during that time, how much has the quality of phone calls improved? How much has it improved in the last 10 years?

Sure, thanks mostly to better software, the new iPhone offers slightly better call quality than the old one. That’s nice, but it still isn’t as good as it could be and, in any event, iPhone users are still locked into AT&T with its lousy coverage.

The larger point is that the evolution of smart phone handset features is on a very steep and aggressive growth curve, while the evolution of actual call quality is very slow.

Sound fluctuation, sound quality, signal strength and signal availability — these basic elements of a cell phone voice call still aren’t good enough for most users.

Coverage

All carrier coverage maps show major gaps where service is unavailable. What they don’t show is where calls will be dropped between cells and, as the New York Times‘ David Pogue reported recently, probably overstate coverage. In the article, Pogue calls for the creation of a “Web 2.0 site where we, the masses, can report the signal strengths of our carriers.” In fact, something like that exists. It’s called droppedcallr.

You should also be aware that the new iPhone’s most sought-after feature, 3G mobile broadband data performance, is available only within AT&T’s limited 3G coverage areas.

For years, we’ve had to choose carriers based on which works where. I’ve switched over the years from Sprint to Verizon to Cingular (now AT&T) trying to find one with coverage that would work for me. One worked at my home, but not at work. Another provided coverage at work, but not at home. AT&T works for me now on the West Coast, but leaves me without coverage in a lot of places on the East Coast. I live in California, so that’s what I settled for.

Late last year, AT&T dropped its specific “fewest dropped calls” slogan and replaced it with something vague — “more bars in more places” — after a lawsuit by Sprint and an investigation by the Better Business Bureau. A more accurate slogan might be “more bars in fewer places.” In fact, AT&T ranks near the bottom in several independent studies of network reliability. But even the highest-ranked carriers aren’t all that great, and all expose customers to dropped calls, dead zones, incomplete cell hand-offs and other annoying problems.

Call quality

I’ve scanned hundreds of reviews on all the major phone handsets looking for opinions about call quality, and found that bland adjectives like “poor” or “fair” or “good” predominate. It’s very rare when anyone talks about “great” or “fantastic” or “perfect” call quality. The phone call experience is broadly mediocre, even on high-end phones.

A study by Ditech Networks published earlier this year found that about 23% of calls in the U.S. and Europe fall below what they call the “industry minimum standard for voice quality” (the number rises to 40% worldwide).

Call quality problems identified by the study include “ambient noise,” “acoustic echo” and “voice level mismatch.”

So while phones get advanced features like GPS, Wi-Fi and better cameras, they still too often have poor quality speakers, microphones, antennas and electronics to manage it all.

I have pretty good hearing, and I find myself turning my cell phone up all the way to maximum volume in moderately noisy environments. In cities or at parties, it’s never loud enough.

Technology exists to solve some of these problems. For example, a Silicon Valley company called Audience Inc. has developed a cell phone chip that blocks background noise during a call. The chip is named the A1010, and it has already been built into a phone by Sharp introduced by NTT DoCoMo into the Japanese market and also a phone by LG Electronics for the Korean market called the SH-400.

Why are we adding GPS chips to our phones before we add chips like this, which provides such a clear benefit to basic cell phone use?

Ten years ago, I lived in New York. Like everybody else, I struggled with dropped calls, poor call quality and other problems. My phone was a clunky, bloated “flip phone” that did only one thing — it made calls. It had a tiny, ultra-low resolution black-and-white screen and a big antenna that you had to pull up for maximum reception.

If you would have told me then that in just 10 years Apple would ship a flat, light cell phone with a giant, beautiful touch screen, magical user interface, fast Web surfing and e-mail, wireless networking, GPS and the ability to run hundreds of applications, well, I would have been amazed.

But if you would have told me that in 10 years I still wouldn’t be able to get good cell-phone reception on Long Island I would have been “really” amazed.

Cell phone handsets have undergone a revolution in features at a pace that boggles the mind. The new 3G iPhone is a stellar example of that transformation. But improvements in the quality of actual phone calls have been horribly slow.

It’s time the industry did something about it. It’s time for us, the consumers, to demand better phone calls, not just better phones.

Mike Elgan writes about technology and global tech culture. He blogs about the technology needs, desires and successes of mobile warriors in his Computerworld blog, The World Is My Office. Contact Mike at mike.elgan@elgan.com or his blog, The Raw Feed.