Call Interference, Quality Issue

[Christion Brannen]

This problem occurs on mine and my wife's g3. It happens in any random place. Sometimes when we're talking to someone our phones will sound like a speaker does when someone is about to recieve a text, and the person we're taking to sounds extremely distorted. The other person never complains that the call quality reduced.

I can have 4g or lte signal with a couple bars and this will still happen sometimes. Usually when i get off, I somehow have 4 or 5 bars and I'm on 2g signal. That's the only time that I'm ever on 2g.

Are our phones defective? Has anyone dealt with this?

 

[Rukbat]

That's called "going digital" and it's the equivalent of static on an AM radio from a weak signal. (Some of the data packets carrying the voice aren't getting to your phone, or are missing enough data so they can't be used. It's due to either local interference (if you're at an airport near the ground radar, it will virtually prevent your phone from working at all) or a weak signal (and dead spots can be as little as a foot across [maybe smaller - about 12" is the smallest one I've ever measured]).

LTE, unless your carrier has VoLTE, is data. Otherwise, voice and text are 2G. So if your carrier doesn't have VoLTE, you're always on 2G for voice, but you're on 3G or 4G (or 4G LTE) for data. Either interference or a dead spot can cause you to lose 3G and/or 4G and the phone will indicate 2G - which is fine for voice calls, but if the signal drops low enough (or is interfered with enough), the signal goes digital. (You're probably on AT&T, TMobile or one of their MVNOs, or some place where all cellular is GSM. Verizon and Sprint (and other CDMA signals) sound like 'underwater' when they go digital.)