The quality gap between wired and wireless phones is about to disappear.

Can you call me back on my landline?

The amazing quality improvement in cell phones can be measured in a number of different ways: the explosion of useful and fun apps, the bazillion-megapixel cameras, the museum-quality industrial design that makes hiding the phones in holster feel like a crime. All of which highlights one area where the phones have remained pretty much awful: voice quality.

That's about to change. Cellular phone calls, after 30 years of sounding worse than landlines, are on course to finally achieve equivalent sound quality by late 2012. After that mobile phone calls will continue to improve until they eventually sound better than today's landlines.

That might sound fanciful.   More