Friday Review: Leader of the pack

When Alexander Graham Bell made the world's first telephone call in 1876, his conversational partner and assistant, Thomas Watson, was located in the next room, and yet his first sentence was "Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you", which suggests that despite the close proximity, the call quality wasn't up to much. 136 years of advancement later and modern mobile technology, combined with high-definition (HD) audio codecs, can deliver call quality good enough that it sounds like the callee isn't so much in an adjoining room but rather in the same room as the caller. This week, further progress was made when three telcos, SK Telecom and LG Uplus of South Korea, and U.S.-based MetroPCS all launched voice over LTE (VoLTE) services. In the same way that many individuals besides Bell claimed to have independently invented the first telephone…