And personally, I'd rather have a little latency added than have to talk over a shitty POTS line. I always had a hard time understanding people over it.
That was AT&T's method. AT&T even had a demo line that you could call that would play various sounds and music and you could press a button to switch between the modes to hear the difference.
But you can't really think that a POTS call sounds better than a modern VOIP call?
Yes, I can. Because just before the pandemic, I was able to use a real POTS network in a remote part of the country. Called from one ranch to another over a rural switch. And it was awesome.
The quality of a call is about more than its audio bandwidth. If that was true, then people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between an iPod and a vacuum tube amp. And, again, latency is a massive factor, as is true asynchronous communication. Arguing over POTS is a whole different thing than arguing over VOIP.
People who defend VOIP claiming it's just as good have never done a side-by-side comparison. The only advantage VOIP has over anything is the usual "make it cheaper" race to the bottom.
These days so much of it is routed over IP, which is where all the latency got added.
So, its hard to know what your "ranch" actually was.
OTOH, its hard for any hardwired system to be half as bad as your average cell phone which are dealing with constant channel quality issues, which results in the robot voice (for lack of a better description), and all the broken up audio, or simply silence that one frequently gets from a cell phone. Basically cell phones suck for actually talking to people. <shrug> But once again, convenience trumps quality.
Voice latency is a big part of why people type on a telephone, instead of talking on it. We're entering a second generation of people who have no idea what it was like talking on an analog POTS network. They'll even argue with you, claiming their VOIP connection across the ocean has the same quality and latency as someone talking on a hard line to a neighbor down the road. Ummm... no. Not even close. Sadly, the older generations didn't realize how good they had it.
Remember when phone companies used to compete on quality? AT&T's "You get what you pay for" campaign. Sprint's "So clear you can hear a pin drop" campaign. MCI's "Static-free coast-to-coast."
Today, it's "We'll bundle six other services you don't want with your phone service and charge you a $1,200 for a new phone. Aren't we great!"