> Because at some point, someone decided that 8 kbps makes for an acceptable audio stream per subscriber.
Has it not been like this for a very long time? I was under the impression that "voice frequency" being defined as up to 4 kHz was a very old standard - after all, (long-distance) phone calls have always been multiplexed through coaxial or microwave links. And it follows that 8kbps is all you need to losslessly digitally sample that.
I assumed it was jitter and such that lead to lower quality of VoIP/cellular, but that's a total guess. Along with maybe compression algorithms that try to squeeze the stream even tighter than 8kbps? But I wouldn't have figured it was the 8kHz sample rate at fault, right?
Has it not been like this for a very long time? I was under the impression that "voice frequency" being defined as up to 4 kHz was a very old standard - after all, (long-distance) phone calls have always been multiplexed through coaxial or microwave links. And it follows that 8kbps is all you need to losslessly digitally sample that.
I assumed it was jitter and such that lead to lower quality of VoIP/cellular, but that's a total guess. Along with maybe compression algorithms that try to squeeze the stream even tighter than 8kbps? But I wouldn't have figured it was the 8kHz sample rate at fault, right?