Phones are Terrible

I don't know about you, but I'm a little ticked about the state of the modern telephone. It's just god awful. Before you say "What?! The telephone is one of the greatest inventions in human history!", just hear me out. I'm not talking about the telephone as an invention in general. I'm talking about the state of voice quality in modern phones.

How many times have you had to say "What?" because your friend's voice sounded too fuzzy? I find myself missing half the things I hear during a phone conversation. It's not my phone; I currently have a Samsung Galaxy S3, one of the latest smartphones on the market. It's not my reception; it's perfectly fine. The telephone just isn't good enough at doing its job.

Two phones. Exact same sound quality.  

I know this is an incredibly strange thing to hear, but that's merely because people don't question it enough. How long as the phone been around? A little over a hundred years? Why is it still in such a sorry state? In my short life, I've seen televisions go from being fuzzy, radioactive bricks to flat, high-resolution behemoths. Video games have transformed from being a mess of black dots to high-powered, computer generated works of art. 

But the telephone? It's exactly the same. It still breaks up when it rains, and it's still too fuzzy for me to hear mumbling assholes. It just astounds me that we still suffer issues like this whilst technology advances at breakneck speed. Note that I'm only talking about the voice quality here. I realize that cellphones have improved dramatically, but think about it. They've improved on everything but the phone call. 

I'm just so dumbfounded by all this. Compare a regular phone conversation to an internet-based voice chat (Skype). As long as the connection is good, you'll find that the difference is ridiculous. Shouldn't all of our conversations be this crisp? I have read that a new phone technology is slowly taking over, but the key word here is slowly. Have you even heard of this new tech? Why isn't it the standard already? Someone please enlighten me.