"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...


Aha! Maybe this is the clue. I should have looked it up but I was
lazy
and thought one of you guys should know:

"For example, engineers at Nokia found that when they compressed
voice
data to 5.15 kilobits per second, which cellphones do automatically
when a tower connection is weak, user ratings fell from "good" to
"fair."...

"Standard compression rates vary from 12.2 kb/s to 4.75 kb/s,
depending on the volume of voice traffic and the strength of the
wireless signal. Calls compressed to speeds as low as 7.95 kb/s can
still sound almost as good as a landline connection. But beyond
that,
"you start to hear compression artifacts," including missing
syllables
and distortions such as ringing or warbling..."

http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wir...-how-to-fix-it

--
Ed Huntress

Where this leads...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_reallocation
"...one proposal would require all TV stations, including LPTV, to
give up all spectrum, with subsidized multichannel services replacing
over-the-air TV, even after viewers spent a great deal of money on the
DTV transition."

--jsw