The only thing cell phones have on copper land lines is portability. In all other ways they suck. I think we only tolerate this because most of us have completely forgotten how much better land lines were, or we never experienced them to begin with. The first big hit to phones came with the cordless models. No longer comfortable to hold against your ear, the earpieces got flat or even convex, and mashing it up against your head made for an unpleasant converation. But hey, we got rid of cords! And then the change to cell phones, with their tiny fraction of available bandwidth, terrible sound quality, high latency, high failure rate, etc.

The astonishing thing is that bandwidth isn't a big deal now, and we could have improved basically all aspects of mobile calls to be within spitting distance of what we used to have 30 years ago.

No wonder people don't like to talk on the phone any more.

> The only thing cell phones have on copper land lines is portability. In all other ways they suck

Isn't that a little like saying "The only thing boats have over cars is that they can go on water. In all other ways they suck"? Portability is the entire point. Even in the "good old days" most people would have accepted nearly any tradeoff for the ability to carry even the simplest global communications device with them.

Depends on your network and your landline but I guess a fairly isshy network compared with a fairly common POT landline you would definitely see a difference. Packet switching (Vs circuit switching) alone should in principal introduce a latency - then there’s a lot more interconnects - and on top of that whatever hocus pocus they use to optimise their (digital) bandwidth usage. Of course modern land lines probably are more like mobile now but not unreasonable to expect circuit switches analogue POT are still widely used.

Cell phones have encoding/compression delay on the voice part, delays waiting for a transmit slot if the air interface is time division multiplexed, sometimes a jitter buffer to allow for resends/error correction, and often less than ideal routing (lots of people are using numbers from out of state, which may require the audio path to traverse that state).

Originally POTS was circuit switched analog connection between you and the other party --- only delays from the wires, and maybe amplifiers. Nowadays POTS is most likely digitally sampled at the telco side, but each sample is sent individually --- there's no delay to get a large enough buffer to send, because for multiplexed lines each individual line is sampled at the same rate and a frame has one sample from each.

More than slight. Stand next to a friend and call him on your cell.

Then try various things like saying “ping”. The results are quite amusing. Or put one phone on speaker.