I see a lot of recommendations for various services and products which are respect privacy, but I don’t think I have seen any discussion around cell phone carriers (service providers). I am aware of some of the advantages of using VOIP as a phone service. However, if VOIP is not desired, what are good options for an US phone carrier which provides a physical SIM or eSIM?
I am guessing I have not seen this discussed because phone calls and SMS texts come with inherent insecurities and can always be associated to your phone number. However, I would assume some carriers sell users data more heavily than others. If anyone knows some recommendations, or can explain what to look for, many thanks.
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.