It&#x27;s the <i>combination</i> of wireless packets dropping and the audio having to be degraded to 8bit&#x2F;8kHz to pass between carriers that really brings on the terrible. It&#x27;s kind of like TCP over TCP [1] -- works well enough a lot of the time, but when it fails, it fails badly because of how the two layers aren&#x27;t really built for each other.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sites.inka.de&#x2F;bigred&#x2F;devel&#x2F;tcp-tcp.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sites.inka.de&#x2F;bigred&#x2F;devel&#x2F;tcp-tcp.html</a>