These days the correct comparison would be to Opus, which is similarly unencumbered and performs fantastically at low bitrates (and has a speech specific mode for even lower bitrates, because it's a hybrid of two codecs). It's also extremely low latency, so there's now no reason to accept trade-offs. (For the same bitrate as alaw/ulaw, you can get high quality full band music with Opus.)

These days it's more or less the standard for realtime voice. WebRTC uses it, most of the popular realtime voice applications use it as well, as does Signal.