Depending on your high speed Internet connection and what you’re surfing when you make a phone call, the quality wobbles up and down like a fishy cell phone connection. Voices are completely understandable but suffer from a ‘tinny’ effect that’s very easy to get over. I have yet to be disconnected or ‘drop’ a call. But the yelling? In short, the VOIP, in all its advances, omits one massively important feature that ‘old-tyme’ landlines had: Side Tone.

It’s really simple. The old phones on the walls allowed a caller to hear themselves in the ear piece by borrowing a tiny sample of the Tip signal. Old telephone lines had two wires, Tip and Ring. One wire made the phone ring when someone called and the other wire passed your voice through and the other party’s voice through to you. But the most important feature that kept quality control was the Side Tone. By hearing your own voice, you didn’t yell; in fact, you could hear yourself whisper secrets when you suspected other ears around the corner.

Whispers were amplified automatically by something called Automatic Gain Control. Microprocessors calculated the signal levels and amplified weak signals and killed down strong signals to help maintain a constant decibel within reason (yells still sounded like yells and whispers still sounded like whispers). Current technology with its fancy-pants cellular and VOIP doo-dads still have Automatic Gain Control which means that yelling into a cell phone works against you as your signal has to be chopped down digitally.

Speaking normally into a cell phone might actually be refreshing to the person at the other end and spare your vocal chords. AGC corrects the levels that you can’t hear since Side Tone doesn’t exist. Just as deaf people tend to need reminders to quiet down, so too do VOIP and cellular users. Automatic Gain Control just ensures that your audience hears your stressed-out voice at normal levels. Bringing the Side Tone back would not be a return to old technology, it would actually enhance the experience of all the new technology for the users AND those of us who are tired of hearing them yell.

You can read someone else’s exact same observations here. John Halleck summarizes Cave Rescue Phones that have Side Talk. Yeah; Cave Rescue Phones? As seen here, Agilent phone testing equipment is notably bungled by the Side Tone ‘crosswalk’ effect on two-wire phones. This disruption may interfere with cellular and VOIP testing that occurs internally or self-testing at the towers and servers. While we found no other mention of this, it would explain the modern lack of Side Talk inclusion.