I hate talking on the phone.

Part of me hates the fact that I can't make eye contact with the other person. Even in bona fide face-to-face conversation, few things irritate me more than people who don't make eye contact when we're speaking. But more than that, I hate talking on the phone because the sound quality is so inexcusably awful. I've stopped counting the number of times I embarrass myself because I couldn't understand what the other person on the phone was saying. To think, I can upload photos to Flickr or download music from iTunes anywhere I have a cell signal, but the sound quality of phone calls has remained virtually unchanged over the last two decades!

Industry executives usually respond to such criticism with the claim that offering higher fidelity phone calls would overtax their networks, landline and cellular. Call me a skeptic. While I'm not an expert in today's super efficient audio compression algorithms — or any other audio processing algorithms for that matter — I have used Skype to make voice calls.

Many people like Skype because it makes long distance calls either inexpensive or free. I love Skype because the sound quality is so deliciously good. When I speak to someone on Skype, their voice doesn't sound mechanical, processed or tinny. It sounds more like that person is sitting across from me in the same room. What's more, the folks at Skype manage to transmit their high fidelity voice calls at between 24 and 128 kilobits per second. For reference, most phone calls in the United States require about 40 kilobits per second of data transmission capacity.

This to me says that telecoms could easily transmit high fidelity phone calls without any major changes in bandwidth requirements. Assuming, of course, that improved sound quality does not increase customer demand for phone use.

There's something obnoxiously ironic about the fact that, of all the features phone companies could have improved over the years, the quality of their core product — phone calls — has barely budged. I love that my iPhone can take pictures, surf the Web and send email. But I would be happier still if all those features did not come at the expense of my phone having an improved "phone" feature.