What surprises me is how easily people have accepted crap audio on their phones in a trade-off to have a portable swiss-army knife computer in their hands all day. POTS had/has great sound quality in comparison. Calls are clear and you rarely get disconnected. Conference calls anymore just wear me out. I spend most of my listing power just trying to figure out what someone just said on their $600 phone.
Agreed. My usage of voice telephone calls has significantly decreased since all systems went to VOIP systems with terrible compression and awful latency. I have been recently powerfully reminded of how bad voice phone calls are these days because I'm on a job hunt and I've been doing lots of phone interviews. Wow it's awful.
The worst part I think is the latency. The timing of a voice conversation is a very important thing, and if they're hearing me say something three seconds late, we always end up talking over each other. God I hate that.
Fortunately, most of the time, the multipurpose computer in my pants gives me communication methods that make the voice call unnecessary.