Can you hear me now?

Does anyone remember those Verizon commercials with the guy who was always saying "can you hear me now? Good." and walking all over the place? Well although it always appears that the person on the other line of the call can hear the man, that might not always be the case now.  Personally I feel that I have to have my call volume all the way up to hear who I am talking to.  I am frequently having to repeat what I say and sometimes I hear my own voice echoing in the phone when I am talking.  I used to think it was just me...but a recent article in the New York Times gives me the answers I am looking for.  I am not crazy.  Call quality really is going bad.  This is not new, in fact companies have been continually trying to remedy the problem with various promises such as high speed LTE or 4G networks.  This process ended up being much more expensive than anticipated, so we are still waiting for these miraculous improvements.  Now this new HD voice is supposed to me the cure-all to the frustrating "what" language that frequents cellular phone calls.

I do not think that this HD voice is worth all the hype around it.  At the moment it will only work on certain networks and with that both callers must have that network.  With the multitude of networks that are out their it is rare to have everyone you need to talk to on the same network.  I think it would be great to have better call quality, however I am skeptical because the other attempts have failed.  I am an avid texter and I think that the bad call quality plays a role in this.  At least it's a good excuse :) I hope that the advancements will make a difference and as a whole we can spend a little bit less time repeating and a little more time conversing.