There IS a long-term technical solution to this (Score 1)

The biggest gripe about phone users is that they speak more loudly than people conversing in person. This is due to inherently poor connection quality. Why is it that cellphone technology still limits voice bandwidth to just a few KHz? It's insane that voice quality hasn't tracked technology improvements over the years. The way to get people to speak more quietly on phones is to: a) Improve voice quality to reliable VOIP-levels (or just use VOIP to begin with, already available on most smartphones) b) Employ background noise rejection at the source (already available on most smartphones) Even after (a) and (b), people will probably speak loudly out of habit. So, (c), echoing the speaker's voice, robustly-amplified, in his/her earpiece may be needed as a reminder to speak quietly. Plane passengers speak to each other in person all the time. And quite loudly, too, to be heard over engine noise. Properly leveraging technology could make it so that cellphone talkers on planes would be MUCH quieter than these in-person conversationalists. If only the industry would actually bother applying this technology to the important-but-less-glamorous aspects of smartphones, namely, voice.