In just 6 weeks from now, two of the three German wireless network operators will switch-off their 3G networks. This has long been in the cards and gave me a bit of a worry. This is because I run LineageOS on my personal smartphone, and since it has a somewhat esoteric chipset from a LineageOS point of view, its unlikely to ever receive a software update with the Voice over LTE (VoLTE) stack activated.
Sure, GSM will live on, so my voice calls will just use this network technology. However, I can hear a difference between 3G and 2G voice, particularly during a handover, so I am not keen to go backwards in time, so to speak.
Fortunately, this problem has almost completely gone away by now, as Conversations has added voice and video calling last year. As far as my personal calls are concerned, I use this IP-based and end-to-end encrypted channel for most of my private calls today. And as far as my business voice conversations are concerned, I have mostly migrated them to IP-based channels as well, such as online meetings / conference calls and the occasional VoLTE call via my business phone.
So thanks again to the XMPP community in general and Daniel Gultsch in particular for adding voice and video calling to the XMPP messaging universe last year! And from what I hear, the Linux based Dino messenger is about to be extended for voice and video calling as well, which will make things even nicer, still!