Sadly, podcasts: Phone calls have gotten worse but might make a comeback
You might think that phone calls with your friends and family are inherently less exciting than the superstimulus that is listening to podcasts at 2x on your noise-cancelling headphones, where the smartest people are being interviewed by the the funniest comedians with their vocal chord surgery-enhanced buttersmooth voices.[1]
But phone calls used to be much better and they were decidedly not parasocial. Only 90s kids will remember how much better the old copper-wire landlines were compared to what we have now: they were crystal-clear, instantaneous, and, as a result, much more fun and intimate (seriously there's a whole generation that never had a good phone call, think about that for a second). But these calls cost ~$1-10/min, and that's why they switched us to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and now they suck.
In modern VoIP calls on packet-switched networks, voice is digitized, compressed, broken into small data packets that travel independently over the internet or cellular networks, and then reassembled at the destination. This leads to jitter where words arrive out of order or at inconsistent intervals, choppy or robotic-sounding audio, dropped words or parts of sentences, making conversations not fun. But the biggest issue is latency: The International Communications Union's guidance for conversational voice recommends one-way mouth-to-ear delay under 150 ms as acceptable, 150-400 ms as tolerable. Bluetooth headsets add another 100-200 ms. Wifi adds some more. But people can detect tiny millisecond differences.[2] This is why calls are fully enshittified now.
Things might get better in a few years: the new 5G VoNR latency can be reduced to as low as 5-10ms, compared to the 30-50ms typically seen with 4G VoLTE.[3] There's also the Bluetooth LE Audio with the LC3 codec which brings latency down to 20-30 ms.
But calls are hard to monetize, and I'm not sure they ('Big Tech', 'Big ASMR', 'Big Podcast') will give us our low latency calls back.
So in the meantime, we need to fight back and do the following for better phone calls:
- Use wired ethernet.[4] I got wired internet via the powerline like TP-Link and recommend them, get them while you can, the US government is trying to ban them (ostensibly it's because of China[5] but maybe they just want us to keep us consuming podcasts). You can also get Gigabit Ethernet Over British Phone Wires
- Use a wired headphone
- Use the Facetime app to make calls via wired ethernet
The person you call doesn't necessarily have to do that… you can unilaterally make calls better (but it's better if the other person also does some of this).
Maybe if we'd all make an effort to make calls better, we'd call each other more and not listen to so many podcasts. There's an elasticity where for every podcast you listen to you call your friends and family less. And people listen to billions of podcasts. Think about that for a second.