Wirelessnorth.ca

Some additional facts people might want to consider:
1. GSM requires 13kbps per voice channel while the PSTN uses 64kbps. There is no free lunch: you want higher quality, then you compress less, which means you consume more bandwidth. VoIP is no exception; you can use broadband codecs to get great sound quality, but you are now consuming additional bandwidth. So if you wanted to offer PSTN-like voice quality to cellphones, then busy urban areas could carry only *one fifth* as many calls as they currently do. Can you say dropped calls and fast busy tones? The alternative would be to shrink cell size and deploy many more base stations. Can you say massive increase in your monthly phone bill?
2. Making things worse, VoIP has a lot of overhead that cellular systems and the PSTN don't have. Once you add the RTP, UDP, IP and Layer 2 headers, the overhead can consume more bandwidth that the payload (the conversation) itself! This isn't a big deal inside a corporate LAN with GigE to the desktop or even at home on a broadband connection, but it *is* a big deal when you talk about wireless because useful spectrum is limited and operators need to get the most out of their allocation of it.
3. Between engineering advances and new allocations of spectrum, we are finally starting to see decent mobile data speeds, so we'll get to mobile VoIP eventually. While 4G is still ill defined in the industry roadmap, one thing that almost everyone agrees upon, is that it will be an all-IP architecture; voice and data will both be carried as packets, so in effect you'll have VoIP.

Rather than just assume that mobile operators are idiots, we might want to consider that maybe they have been trying to balance the limits of existing technology with consumers' ability to pay and the returns their investors want.

Mobile operators aren't idiots. They milk their customers with voice plans and data plans. If people start to realize that voice is essentially data, like how SMS is essentially data, they would question why they are paying for them at a different rate.

Prices are set by what the market is willing to bear. We could all live without cellphones (think back 10-12 years), but we choose instead to pay the high fees. In that sense, all companies "milk" their customers.

Not all companies are in a competition-deprived industry. In most industries, prices are not set at what consumers are willing to pay but at competitive prices. The choice that consumers need to make should not be between having a cell or not, it should be between competitive plans and services. Ideally. Anyways, my original point wasn't to bitch more about the telcos. It was if telcos use VOIP, they won't be able to convince their customers to pay for both voice and data.

Voice quality is superb on GSM very close to PSTN even when talking cell phone to cell phone
BUT NOT IN CANADA, Rogers has not implemeted it correctly or had the network optimised correectly.
Try the networks in UK and Europe and they are superb, loud and very clear. Im not talking about coverage or the number of signal bars - Im talking about voice clarity and quality

I stayed for a lengthy period of time in two cities outside Canada in the past years where I never had the feeling of not knowing for sure whether it will be a good or bad quality call. There were 4-5 lines 100% on the time on the streeet (maybe 2-5 in the subway) and not a single dropped call. In Canadian cities it's a different story. Maybe this is just personal bias?

Not all cell phones have bad quality. Mine is great most of the time but then sometimes it will be bad for no apparent reason. It's not knowing for sure whether it will be a good or bad quality call that is annoying.