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Re:Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered by l1ambda on Thursday March 30, 2017 @02:38PM (#13997815)
The Opus codec ( http://opus-codec.org/comparison/ ) can enable very low latency audio. 26.5 ms algorithmic delay (the time it takes to go through the algorithm) by default, but can be set to a very impressive 5ms. Digital audio can't achieve the near no-latency analog POTS has, but it can get pretty darn close e.g. if Opus is used in the very low latency mode. I believe Mumble and maybe TeamSpeak let you choose the Opus latency. I know some other apps like WhatsApp, Wire, and Signal use Opus as well. I don't know what settings they use though.

Another problem is cell phones add ~150ms latency (pre VoLTE) and people that route calls through Google Voice adds an additional 150ms+ latency on top. If you ever talk to someone on a cell phone on google voice, it sounds like they're calling from the moon.

150ms is about the human limit before turn-taking and talking over each other becomes an annoyance. That's why cell-to-landline conversations (150ms one way) were tolerable, but cell-to-cell (300ms one way) conversations are abysmal. And that's all in the same area code. Once you add long distance, it gets worse.

Re:Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered by doctorshady on Thursday March 30, 2017 @03:48PM (#13998340)
Just fyi, POTS is digital up until the very last mile. While the network is digital, it uses time multiplexed serial PCM streams under the hood. Aside from the delay imposed by fiber transmission at the trunk level (~40 milliseconds from one side of the US to the next. If you're using a long distance network that packetizes the connection or sends a call on some weird route, that can certainly increase), the g.711 encoding delay should be fixed at 0.125 milliseconds.
Re:Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered by l1ambda on Thursday March 30, 2017 @06:04PM (#13999305)
Interesting. I didn't know g.711 was so low. Typical VOIP latency must then stem from D/A and A/D conversion and internet latency.
Re:Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered by makomk on Thursday March 30, 2017 @06:37PM (#13999513)
g.711 has such low latency because it doesn't take advantage of inter-sample redundancy in any way whatsoever - it's just raw 8-bit samples at 8 ksps with a compander on either end (traditionally on the analog side of the DAC and ADC).
Re:Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered by 77pt77 on Thursday March 30, 2017 @04:53PM (#13998769)
> I know some other apps like WhatsApp, Wire, and Signal use Opus as well

Opus is an evolution of SILK which is/was used in Skype.

Re:Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered by mgamache on Thursday March 30, 2017 @08:12PM (#14000148)
I think you can get < 5ms latency with Opus depending on the sample rate.