voice quality on 3g vs gsm

I am a verizon user and honestly I love it. But all my friends and
family are on ATT so I am most likely going to switch. About 6months
ago I tried a 30day trial with ATT but the voice quality was terrible.
I live in a 3g market, but I did not have a 3g phone. So is the voice
quality better on 3g(if you have the phone) than gsm?

It is alleged that planetx claimed:

> I am a verizon user and honestly I love it. But all my friends and
> family are on ATT so I am most likely going to switch. About 6months
> ago I tried a 30day trial with ATT but the voice quality was terrible.
> I live in a 3g market, but I did not have a 3g phone. So is the voice
> quality better on 3g(if you have the phone) than gsm?

That question is like asking "do you drive to work or take a lunch?"
"3G" has nothing to do with which cellular technology you're using. And
in my experience, little to do with the voice quality, though some may
disagree on that.

What matters more on voice quality is coverage strength where you are
and where the other person is, and the phones in use at both ends. You
can have a perfect signal and get lousy voice quality if you or the
other end is on a crappy phone, or you can have the best phone in the
word at both ends, but if one of you has only marginal signal, it'll
sound like crap.

Forex, without moving my location, when I upgraded from a Treo 650 to a
Treo 680, there was a marked increase in voice quality. Same carrier,
same geographic area. The phone was the only difference.

It doesn't matter if you're talking about AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon,
Sprint, or one of the smaller carriers. Check the coverage maps for
each and stay or go with the one that has the better coverage where you
spend most of your time or absolutely need the coverage.

Where "3G" really matters is when you're talking about data services.

--
Jeffrey Kaplan www.gordol.org
The from userid is killfiled Send personal mail to gordol

"Aim towards the Enemy." - Instruction printed on US Rocket Launcher

planetx wrote:

> I am a verizon user and honestly I love it. But all my friends and
> family are on ATT so I am most likely going to switch. About 6months
> ago I tried a 30day trial with ATT but the voice quality was terrible.
> I live in a 3g market, but I did not have a 3g phone. So is the voice
> quality better on 3g(if you have the phone) than gsm?

3G has absolutely nothing to do with voice. While it is true with Verizon
and Sprint that CDMA is also used for voice, for the rest of the planet,
GSM is used for voice. Data can be GPRS/EDGE or in the case of 3G and
better, UMTS/HSDPA. For some reason, when I talk to people on Sprint and
Verizon, they sound like they have marbles in their mouths but I honestly
do not know that it is not a lot of really bad handsets out there or the
technology itself. Maybe I should buy a bag of marbles and join the fun.
Can you hear me now? Yes but Damn!


Dave

At 08 Nov 2007 07:05:38 -0800 David W Studeman wrote:

> For some reason, when I talk to people on Sprint and
> Verizon, they sound like they have marbles in their mouths but I
honestly
> do not know that it is not a lot of really bad handsets out there or the
> technology itself.

Both CDMA and GSM are capable of good voice quality, but the ever
increasing need for bandwidth encourages cell providers to use lower bit-
rate codecs. I think T-Mobile has the best voice quality in the US right
now, better than AT&T (who uses the same technology, GSM) but it's worse
than it was a few years ago.

> Maybe I should buy a bag of marbles and join the fun.
> Can you hear me now? Yes but Damn!


Apparently the bandwidth crunch even effects texting- "See you later"
seems to get reduced to "C U L8R" on most phones these days! ;-)

On 2007-11-08, David W Studeman <eat_your_own_spam@hormel.com> wrote:
> planetx wrote:
>> I am a verizon user and honestly I love it. But all my friends and
>> family are on ATT so I am most likely going to switch. About 6months
>> ago I tried a 30day trial with ATT but the voice quality was terrible.
>> I live in a 3g market, but I did not have a 3g phone. So is the voice
>> quality better on 3g(if you have the phone) than gsm?
>
> 3G has absolutely nothing to do with voice. While it is true with Verizon
> and Sprint that CDMA is also used for voice, for the rest of the planet,
> GSM is used for voice. Data can be GPRS/EDGE or in the case of 3G and
> better, UMTS/HSDPA.

That's not right. Both GSM and 3G UMTS provide both voice and data
service. Right now my phone is getting service from a 2100 MHz UMTS
operator in Hong Kong, and it makes voice calls just fine. The phone
also works fine for voice service in Japan where there is UMTS service
but no GSM service.

It may be that AT&T always uses GSM, and never UMTS, for voice, but
this isn't how it works most other places on the planet.

I'd note that there is a general difference between GSM and CDMA
codecs, though. GSM codecs send a fixed bit rate, since a fixed
bandwidth is assigned to the phone when a call is connected. For
CDMA, however, variable rate codecs (i.e. that send more bits per
second when you are talking than when you are not) make sense since
when you send fewer bits everyone else sharing the bandwidth gets
less noise. In principle there should be no way to tell the difference
between the sounds to these two types of codecs, but no never know.

Dennis Ferguson

On Thu, 08 Nov 2007 08:38:08 -0700, Todd Allcock wrote:

> At 08 Nov 2007 07:05:38 -0800 David W Studeman wrote:
>
>> For some reason, when I talk to people on Sprint and Verizon, they
>> sound like they have marbles in their mouths but I
> honestly
>> do not know that it is not a lot of really bad handsets out there or
>> the technology itself.
>
> Both CDMA and GSM are capable of good voice quality, but the ever
> increasing need for bandwidth encourages cell providers to use lower
> bit- rate codecs. I think T-Mobile has the best voice quality in the US
> right now, better than AT&T (who uses the same technology, GSM) but it's
> worse than it was a few years ago.
>
>> Maybe I should buy a bag of marbles and join the fun. Can you hear me
>> now? Yes but Damn!
>
>
> Apparently the bandwidth crunch even effects texting- "See you later"
> seems to get reduced to "C U L8R" on most phones these days! ;-)

That's pretty funny. I wasn't aware that it wasn't the text message fiends
gone mad on society, thanks for clearing this up.
I do use T-Mobile for voice and I've been pretty happy with it. My Moto
MPx200 while not being the loudest ringer on the planet, gave good voice
and was lacking 850mhz so using T-Mo with it was a no brainer. I'm now
using a Nokia N95-3 which also seems to sound good with the T-mo sim in it
but my AT&T account is Data only and I use it with a data card so I have
no way to know how AT&T would sound on it. I should have known it was the
codecs though. Nothing like taking decades old digital quality and
degrading it with a new space saving codec.



Dave

David W Studeman <eat_your_own_spam@hormel.com> wrote in
news:473325c6$0$510$815e3792@news.qwest.net:

> 3G has absolutely nothing to do with voice.

That's not entirely true.....

Skype and the other VoIPs work great with 3G...or even EDGE.

So, 3G does do voice.....sort of....(c;

It sure does it a lot cheaper!...hee hee.

Larry
--
You can tell there's extremely
intelligent life in the universe
because they have never called Earth.