Can you hear me now?

Remember those old Verizon commercials, with the nerdy guy out in the field testing cell coverage? The call quality bar used to be so high. It could just be my imagination, but I feel like cell phone calls used to be so clear before we started adding the Gs to the network names. I assume a big barrier to early cell phone adoption was legibility of the calls. If you can't hear someone on the go, why not just wait until you're both home?

Of course, today we're more often than not. But still, we balk into the phone can you hear me now?! GERALD YOU'RE BREAKING UP; WE CAN'T FOLLOW! Despite gigabit internet speeds and voice over IP, our calls still suck. Sure you've got hundreds of megs coming to your house, but your router is from 2009 and struggling to push signal to your machine. And your kids are in the next room, all three of them streaming separate cartoons in glorious 4k. Not to mention your shitty $10 chinese airpod ripoffs adding a lot of noise to the signal chain.

So despite all the technology bringing all this power into our homes, we are unable to have a comfortable conversation over the telephone. Have you talked on a landline recently? The things are crystal clear, working flawlessly on decades-old technology. The phone rings, you answer, and it sounds just like you're in the room together. It worked like that for decades, perfectly fine, until we sold ourselves on a future that's turned out to be no good.

Hello, this is the future calling, and we want to tell you the grass isn't greener here. And while we've got you, sign up for a landline with your local telecom operator!