I just have had a totally different experience then, I have to say. I associate people dialing in from their phones with high levels of background noise, both hissing static and actual background noise, and clipping/lost words. This includes coworkers in Europe and california.
After all, the listener is receiving over VoIP, so you've got phone network issues layered on voip issues.
Just want to add that I've had this exact experience with people using phone audio with the added variant of them losing cellular signal every few minutes.
Weird, here (france) I made all my family's calls go through VoIP and voice clarity increased a thousandfold, it feels like going from a 1930 radio station to a CD
What’s the preferred service in France for that? Do you mean you set it up yourself with a particular SIP/IAX vendor, or just switched to free.fr or one of those providers?