I have Sprint, a digital phone service. When I call other family members who have that, we talk easily just like on land lines.
When I get calls from other people, often there are words lost in both directions when we talk at the same time, resulting in a lot of waiting and repeating, as though we were on a radio walkie talkie.
Do they all have analog phones, or is it just random? Or perhaps a function of distance (those relatives are all fairly close-by)?
Do analog to analog conversations have this problem?
I have Sprint D. and haven’t noticed a problem. I suspect the service is not full duplex which would require two channels OR time division duplexing.
Ask Sprint. Pick up your CP and call THEM.
They are the last place I would expect to divulge problems.
Their printed documentation certainly gives no clue about possible difficulties, except to blame a “lack of signal bars” which is not happening in the cases I encounter.
Sprint to Sprint is clearly full duplex, as I have tested it two people intentionally talking over each other and yet hearing each other with no drop outs.
I suspect Sprint to analog problems are not caused by lack of full duplex on the Sprint end.
My guesses:
Perhaps some analog phones are not full duplex? Hard to imagine in this day.
Perhaps the analog to digital conversion takes enough time to register as gaps and skips?
And again, perhaps distance creates problems just as it did in the land-line long distance days on calls overseas.
You’ve almost got it. When calling within your own system, the compression is maintained from your phone to your caller’s. Unfortunately different companies use different compression schemes so when you are calling another service another round of decompression/compression must occur. Sometimes the compression schemes don’t play well together and cause distortion/dropouts.