I have equally clear memories of my first overseas calls carried by undersea fiber because the lack of latency was so pronounced compared to what I had become accustomed to by then.
I still can barely tolerate carrying on a conversation on a cell phone though. The latency and compression artifacts are just horrible compared to a landline. VOIP has gotten pretty good though. I can't tell the difference between a good VOIP landline and a POTS line.
You: Copy.
All landlines now get digitised and packetized, and usually go over an IP network, frequently via the landline companies HQ hundreds of miles away, before heading back to your neighbours house who you were calling...
Data is the same - If I ping my next door neighbor, from my broadband connection to his, it goes via London (my ISP's headquarters) and Manchester (his ISP's headquarters) before coming back to him, with a round trip latency of >20ms. In sound terms, that delay is like him standing in the next room over.
I feel like that would be enough to be basically perfect, though. If only we could cut down on everything else in the chain adding its own latency.
We've had it for so long now with digital cell phone calls, even HD calling, certainly Zoom et al (some are particularly aggressive on the noise gate when others are speaking over you).
It's a lot to process. With 15 people on "speakerphone", the audio is IMO the biggest and most taxing problem.
I do a number of actual play games and it's the players trying to use the built in mics/headphones that have difficulty hearing the group conversations.
I use a high quality external sound card and don't have that problem - hangouts does seem to disconnect me when I don't speak for a while as my noise floor is so low
Siri is the like the Apple Maps of voice assistants.
Alexa (at least Echo gen 3) doesn't have this delay. I can talk with Alexa without getting frustrated at the latency. (unfortunately Alexa doesn't handle pauses or stumbles in sentences well)
FWIW I say please & thank you too, and am opted-in to "Improve Siri" which Apple really ought to known to make opt-in from the start.
I also have type-to-Siri (in accessibility settings) for things like "What's playing?".
Lag is generally not noticeable on cellphones, and lag has always been a problem with landlines on long-distance (especially far-international) calls.
What you're describing "like a walkie-talkie" is actually the difference between half-duplex and full-duplex.
Landlines are full-duplex, and cell phones were notoriously bad half-duplex... until 4G which is considered full-duplex. There's also the issue of carriers muting audio completely when it's under a certain threshold, which makes them less responsive, because you have to ask "are you there?" every so often.
Videoconferencing latency is a separate issue, because there's one central server for each meeting, so if it's between the NY and SF office, the server may be in SF, so two separate NY participants get double the latency talking to each other than they do talking to SF. But, everybody hears the same audio.
You might say, well why don't they select a server in the middle of the country for that call then? But selecting an optimal server location for a videoconferencing call is difficult, even if you have access to cloud locations all over the country/world, because you usually don't know in advance who's going to join the call. So whoever hosts the call or whoever's the first participant, the server is often chosen to simply be whichever one is closest to them, which can sometimes be quite suboptimal once everyone's joined. (And I sure wouldn't want to be the one to write code for switching servers mid-call.)
Also, videoconferencing is much closer to "half-duplex" because if you were always mixing everyone's audio together, it would be a noisy mess.
But in conclusion -- latency/delay isn't a significant new problem that digital networks have introduced. It's always been there, but duplex, silence thresholds, and conference calls are the more important factors to pay attention to.
Zoom does not (at least AFAIK), so I have no way to judge if I’m speaking at an appropriate volume.
- The headsets were comfortable and practical. I have not seen anything sold for office or even gaming use begin to approach the ergonomics. Plantronic, Logitech, none of it.
- Every headset had foldback, so even the big sound-isolating cans felt natural to speak into. I've spent several hours messing with virtual sound cards trying to make this work with Zoom and never managed it.
- The signal was so clear, and the mics were so good, that as long as you enunciated you could speak just a hair above a whisper and be reliably understood. I remember analog PSTN voice, and this was 10x better. Might have to do with less aggressive EQ.
- Full duplex, no gating. Absolutely no problem with multiple people speaking at the same time. At very busy parts of the show we might intentionally have two simultaneous interactions on the same channel. It was a bit of work to unpack in your brain, but no harder than it would have been in person.
- Obviously no noticeable latency (basic fitness for purpose - these things are for calling cues).
- There was a little bit of analog hum + background noise from each station, so when someone opened their mic you would notice, but it wasn't disruptive. When the channel was busy, this sort of substituted for body language and you'd be invited to speak at the first opportunity.
- Physical switch to open and close the mic. I know Zoom has spacebar PTT, but one button press latch on/off is also important.
It's absolutely astounding to me just how much better these systems are than their nearest alternatives 30+ years later. If I ever control a tech office, particularly with an operations component, I'll seriously consider installing one.
FWIW, what you're describing is achievable with a decent audio interface, something like the AT BPHS1/BPHS2, and some cough/mute switches. My travel rig for video has full direct monitoring/sidetone for up to eight microphones/headsets, including wireless transmitters if I need to go that route; it's fantastic.
The current state of affairs for normal people is as bad as it is because normal people don't care.
The reason is very similar to landlines. A dedicated board in each station that shares three copper lines with every other station. In this scenario you cannot beat analogue.
The ease of setup is also fantastic. All you need is some XLR cables. At some point on the line you need a power supply, which usually acts as a signal splitter so you can have lines going in different directions. Then just plug everything together.
OTOH everyone on a Web video chat always sounds like they're YELLING. Even if the volume's turned down, the tone registers as yelling. Having those happening nearby with regularity, even behind a (thin) wall, is about as bad as the proverbial open-office-seated-near-sales situation.
I think people talk louder on cell phones than they did on old analog land lines, too.
I have an external USB microphone from Schure that has an integrated 3.5mm headphone jack and mic volume dial. It mixes the sound of your own voice and the line-out from your computer, just like landline phones do. You might want to give it a try.
They weren't always, except for local calls. My Background: I made a lot overseas phone calls in the 1980's to talk to my father, from North America to Japan. I also took a telecom class going through uni.
When calling Japan, not only was it crazy expensive, but the connection was typically terrible. We considered it amazing to be calling Japan at all, so that was ok. Issues:
1. Latency, just start talking when the ringing stops. If you wait to hear the person say "hello" they'd generally hang up before they heard you. Sometimes it would be around 5s latency, we always said this must be "satellite" connections vs using undersea cables.
2. Voice quality. You could hear and recognize the person on the far side, but that's about it.
3. Cost. I don't remember the cost exactly since I was young, but I remember it was between $2-$5/min in 1980's dollars. Calls were short.
Latency was a major focus of telecom networks for a couple of reasons. One was human, obviously humans really prefer low latency in telecom networks. Good old school POTS lines also have to sidetone[1] the old fashioned way, and if the round trip time gets too high it's really disruptive to hear your own voice > 300ms later. But this causes a big echo problem, so have a shorter round trip time makes the echo cancellation filters shorter/easier.
1) Sidetone is hearing your own voice come out of the speaker. Analog POTS lines are super cool this way, on longer connections the signal is weaker so the sidetone is weaker, so the human speaks louder. This means their own voice is louder so the person at the far end can hear them over the weaker signal.
When I went back to South Korea in 1994 I was able to telnet into compuserve from on base, and then email back home.
That constant delay, plus the worse ones when the connection loses strength, put a constant toll on "zoom" conversations.
I think that is the main factor but many of the items they brought up in the article also add to it but my guess is if there were no delay or drop in quality, it would be very manageable.
I feel like microsoft is still cluseless, looking at bing analytics and thinking millions of people search for "notepad" every day because they really think its a great thing to research?
- yes lag, having to deal with delays and jump in at the right time is fatiguing
- audio - auto-muting, inexact codecs, compression artifacts, bad echo cancellation
- small screen, and mismatched eyes
- there is also etiquette.
inadvertent - people who talk too loud or don't understand the lag or don't notice their drop outs
should-know-better - people who use speakerphone and inflict it on people who deal with headsets to give others good sound. or carry their devices moving
To be fair, this varies by speakerphone. I use a landline phone with a high quality speakerphone. As far as I've been told, the quality is as good as possible (limited by the line I'm dialing into).
With Zoom, Facetime etc, it's hard to gauge who's talking to who. Side conversations within groups are impossible. You also can't get a feel over another person's body language.
No modern system allows that. Some old ones (analogue TV) did.
Even in the early cellphone days, I'd often prefer using my landline. There was less lag. Cellphones felt like speakerphones where it tries to do that cancellation stuff and you feel like the conversation is split into pieces .. like a walkie-talkie where you don't control the "over" / button press.
Cellphones have gotten better, but they've never really hit the latency of landlines (or maybe they have and I didn't notice. I never actually talk to people on my phone any more). Video conferencing like that that but worse. It's really apparent if you're on a remote team and you're next to someone on the same call. You can hear that delay.
I like a lot of the fatigue comes from that delay. We can connect more people now, with video, over great distances, but it does come at a cost at moving from virtual dedicated circuits to package switches networks and transcoding on some central server.