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Recommendations for a more private US phone carrier
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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Privacy
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Just as a heads-up: VOIP is more difficult to tap than conventional GSM calls are. What are your issues with VOIP?
What costs privacy in mobile networks is that the mobile operator has to know where you are (roughly) by design. They need to route your traffic to the antenna that's communicating with you after all. That's something that can't be mitigated.
Voip call quality is terrible, it is near unusable over mobile data IME, it adds latency etc.
I guess an intermediate measure might be to make all your phone calls through a forwarding proxy (e.g. implemented with Twilio API) so that all the mobile carrier sees is that your phone calls all go to the same number. Similarly you'd give out a VOIP DID number that forwards to your mobile, so all your incoming calls would appear to come from the same number.
Oh boy, welcome to the whacky world of phone telecom.
It's not an inherent VoIP issue, you can select any audio codec you want, including lossless CD quality if you want. The issue is you need to make sure your call will end up using the best supported in common from your VoIP provider and the carrier you're calling to. Some carriers try to make people believe other carriers are crap by restricting the good codecs to themselves and their customers, so everytime you call someone on the other carriers, it sounds like crap, and makes the users feel like clearly the other carrier has to be crap because it's fine when it's with the same carrier.
My VoIP calls show up as HD calls and sound identical to other VoLTE HD calls just fine though. I'm using Linphone for Android and voip.ms as the provider, no issues other than navigating all the settings on their website is... a bit of a mess. But hey, they let you configure near everything so.
The codecs are built into the client (I'm using linphone) and they all sound like crap. Provider is vitelity.net but I have a twilio account so could try that. Also, they only work at all when the phone is online by wifi. Using the phone's mobile data is total fail. Too many dropouts etc.
Never ever have issues with VoIP. Sounds like a local telecom issue.
Okay, maybe the carriers you used do really have a shitty codec in pl,ace then. Yet I don't see why this would be a privacy issue.