Once you've spoken with your young son or daughter on a wide-band telephony connection, you'll never want to go back to your old POTS (Plain Old Telephony Service) phone line again.  Children have such high pitched voices that the upper frequencies get chopped off and it's hard/impossible to distinguish your boy from your girl.

I've wondered for many years why the phone companies don't offer wide-band, 16khz audio for phonecalls.  I can sort of understand how upgrading the entire network infrastructure is expensive and maybe would promote incompatibilities among carriers who adopt different wideband technologies, but why not high-quality between callers on a single network?  If AT&T is so proud of its push-to-talk service, why not go the next step and make all ATT-ATT calls high-quailty?

Turns out the answers to that obvious question aren't easy, but I'm glad that TMCNet writer Rick Bye has at least summarized the challenges. He concludes with good news:

So, wideband telephony, an exciting feature that has been ‘coming soon’ for a long time, but may now actually be on its way, offering clear benefits to end users that should result in more and more people switching to VoIP services.