I think it has less to with our acceptance of low quality and more to do with the structural shake out of the industry since 2000.
In 1998 there were three large and a good number of small-medium GSM carriers along with four CDMA networks. The cost of spectrum spiraled up in 2000 - so much so that there was little if any capital for infrastructure build-out. With the consolidation that followed those left standing were two virtual monopolies (what happened to the 1983 decree?) with Sprint and T-Mobile barely hanging on. So in the end the "we" part of "our" could do nothing but accept whatever quality we were handed.
Skype may be the best – both the best of what? Without any real competition, it's the only game in town – especially for small business – and without competition, there's no incentive to improve.
That said I'm not sure what the disappointing wireless network quality in the US has to do with Skype being business grade. VoIP and wireless network technology have little to do with each other. Are you saying there's a connection between the so-so quality of VoIP/Skype and poor US GSM network quality? I agree at least that it's not gotten much better since 2000 but saying the quality of one is so bad it makes the other look good in comparison is not the way to judge either.
From my own experience I can't say skype is business grade, a lot of the times background noise spills over into the conversation, while thr quality of the sound really depends on the kind of hardware being used, there are still many kinks skype needs to straighten out before in can be seriously considered to be business grade. Additionally, people's behaviour and attitudes also need to change for these kind of tools to work in a business environment, in the sub-continent especially people need to be educated on the proper use before they're put into a particular situation.
Because what you are doing with speech-to-text is asynchronous voice communication, rather than realtime...a kind of advancement of where the market is going. (Sidetrack: I just saw an ad on Sunday Night Football for Droid that would do what the Star Trek universal translator did...you speak a phrase and it translates and speaks it in Spanish...presumably other languages!)
But yes, you could even have a "telephone conversation" by sending each other translated voice messages in text! It would be super efficient because telephone conversations are already really restricted in the range of sounds. And having two channels open for the duration of a call is also really inefficient, rather than one stateless http session that sends the text data to be transformed back to speech (for hands free).
jaballo - the whole use of realtime voice has really declined.
This is off-topic, but I've found that since I got my iPhone 5 a month or so ago I've been using the voice transcription feature to dictate text messages, tweets, and emails. It's a form of voice communications. I sometimes imagine that my recipient might be using text-to-voice to listen to the message.
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The US National Security Agency learned the hard way that it can be dangerous to give a contractor too much money and access, with too little scrutiny. The NSA and other government agencies hire tens of thousands of contractors
a year to analyze data. Edward Snowden -- who revealed himself as the NSA leaker after fleeing the country -- was one such contractor, reportedly holding a $122,000 salaried position at Booz Allen Hamilton at the time of his departure.
Midsize businesses rarely achieve the same standards of security in their own datacenters as professional providers that specialize in delivering these services to organizations.
Big-data and analytics tools enable marketers to understand customers as individuals, identifying unmet needs and addressing each customer as a "segment of one," says John Kennedy, VP corporate marketing, IBM.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco kicked into high gear today, and we've already begun to see news emerging from that lovely city-state by the sea.
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