You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

by Kate Murphy

Jerry Gibson, an electrical engineer and distinguished professor at the University of California–Santa Barbara, told me one of the reasons why it’s so hard to have a decent cell phone conversation is because voice calls are a low priority for service providers. There is higher demand for video and data, he said, so wireless providers have gotten stingy on the bandwidth, or bit rates, they allot for voice calls. The result is poor sound quality but fewer interruptions in service. “Their calculation is you will be less frustrated by a bad connection than a dropped connection,” said Gibson, who is an expert in mobile communication technology and author of several books on the subject with titles like Information Theory and Rate Distortion Theory for Communications and Compression. In other words, there are technological reasons contributing to your disinclination to talk on the phone. “You get low enough bandwidth and the call is tinny, breaks in and out, and doesn’t sound very good,” Gibson said. “It’s no wonder people would rather text.”