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T-Mobile To Pay $40 Million Over False Ring Tones on Rural US Calls (reuters.com)
David Shepardson, writing for Reuters: T-Mobile USA agreed on Monday to pay $40 million to resolve a government investigation that found it failed to correct problems with delivering calls in rural areas and inserted false ring tones in hundreds of millions of calls, the Federal Communications Commission said. T-Mobile, a unit of Deutsche Telekom, agreed to changes and acknowledged that it had injected false ring tones into hundreds of millions of long-distance rural calls, the FCC said, in violation of FCC rules.
False ring tones "cause callers to believe that the phone is ringing at the called party's premises when it is not," the FCC said, noting uncompleted calls "cause rural businesses to lose revenue, impede medical professionals from reaching patients in rural areas, cut families off from their relatives, and create the potential for dangerous delays in public safety communications."
False ring tones "cause callers to believe that the phone is ringing at the called party's premises when it is not," the FCC said, noting uncompleted calls "cause rural businesses to lose revenue, impede medical professionals from reaching patients in rural areas, cut families off from their relatives, and create the potential for dangerous delays in public safety communications."
What the hell is a false ring tone? My phone rings because T-Mobile asked it to?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
inserted false ring tones
like they pretended you were getting phone calls to convince you your reception was good? these words make no sense arranged in this order
FCC chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement it “is a basic tenet of the nation’s phone system that calls be completed to the called party, without a reduction in the call quality — even when the calls pass through intermediate providers. The FCC is committed to ensuring that phone calls to all Americans, including rural Americans, go through."
Glad Obama appointed him to the FCC board.
From the article:
The FCC said false ring tones “cause callers to believe that the phone is ringing at the called party’s premises when it is not.” The agency added that uncompleted calls “cause rural businesses to lose revenue, impede medical professionals from reaching patients in rural areas, cut families off from their relatives, and create the potential for dangerous delays in public safety communications.”
TL;DR: They made your phone ring in the caller's ear, even though the call was probably not ringing at the receiver's end.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
"FCC chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement it “is a basic tenet of the nation’s phone system that calls be completed to the called party, without a reduction in the call quality — even when the calls pass through intermediate providers. The FCC is committed to ensuring that phone calls to all Americans, including rural Americans, go through.”"
Too bad he doesn't feel the same way about connections made over the internet.
I'm a tmobile customer and frankly this has annoyed me. I've been hit by it when I have to travel out into the remote expanses where I'm roaming or in a weak tmobile signal area. It does ring but no voicemail nothing, just ring ring ring.. It's annoying as fuck.
Now, I'm doubly pissed at tmobile but I'm also pissed that I'm not the one that'll be compensated for my trouble, it'll be the feds.. Why should they
pocket the loot if I'm the guy that's been wronged?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Problem is that the US network doesn't use separate routing tones, so there would have to be silence while the device is looked for. Other countries have routing tones that sound like a fast "dah-dah-dah-dah-dah" when the phone is being located or the call is being switched, only changing to a ring tone (often sounds like BEEEEEP-BEEEEEEP) when the phone is actually ringing.
As someone who is involved with modern telecom, I can say that all ringtones are false. The tone used to be generated by the analog system when the high ring voltage was sent to the destination phone. Therefore all ringtones are false.
The modern systems are supposed to start generating the tones once a connection is more or less established between the endpoints. This is often well before the destination endpoint actually generates the ring voltage (in the case of a real analog PSTN connection) or a tone on the destination digital device.
This is why if you call another phone in the same room the rings you hear on the calling phone's speaker will not match the actual "rings" on the ringing device.
It looks like the FCC was taking T-Mo to task for generating the tones on calls it knew were not going to complete.
I'm all for reasonable regulation, but this seems like a blatant shakedown. There are lots of good reasons to provide local ringback. Carriers have been transitioning to SIP backbones for years now. Unfortunately, due to the "standard-not-a-standard" nature of SIP, there are a lot of integration and routing issues that occur when you go to an IP backbone. Individual calls can take more time to set up through an intermediate network due to IP routing issues, congestion, different equipment manufacturers etc.
When that happens would you rather hear a whole lot of nothing for several long seconds, or would you rather hear something (like a ring maybe) so that you don't continually hang up and redial (causing more call setup congestion in the process)? How is providing ringback hurting anyone? I don't really understand what they're regulating here.
Luckily I have Cricket (AT&T) and it doesn't even work in my basement where the rec. room is (and me).
We couldn't get Telstra (Australia) to acknowledge they were inserting false ring tones into calls to my father's landline until we submitted video evidence of us calling it from a mobile - right beside it. The mobile has happily ringing away on speakerphone while the table top phone remained stubbornly silent. Up until then Telstra refused to admit there was a problem, "no sir, the line tests OK."
This is technically called a ringback tone. It's generated locally; that is, it is not synchronized with the actual ring on the other end. That's why, on old landline telephones, someone would answer the telephone before you heard it actually ring on your calling end.
For '95 to '00 I was a consultant for Globalstar. One of the problems we faced was the phone was too quiet, people would think Something Went Wrong, and hang up. We solved it by replacing the nothing with white noise. Cost G* money to do so. Sending nothing cost nothing as we didn't have to setup/teardown a call, but for white noise we had to setup the call, send a packet of white noise, and teardown the call (think of knocking on a door, as opposed to putting mail in a mailbox).
I guess they could come up with a "working on it" tone, but who is going to know what that is? That's a hell of an education campaign someone has to pay for.
I have a problem with a phone I put on pageplus it can't receive calls from any of our verizon wireless phones however it rings like normal it's just the pageplus phone doesn't actually ring (it does from any other carriers line).
Verizon blames pageplus and pageplus blames verizon and nobody will fix it.
Extra info
The verizon wireless lines can call the pageplus phone successfully but only if they are either on VoLTE or roaming.
Just to note pageplus uses verizon wireless network.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I'm confused by this because many providers do the same damn thing and not only is it ANNOYING, but BREAKS phone routing. There are providers who charge on _ring_ too. Hell anyone whose ever called a lost cellphone only to hear rings on their end but no actual phone ringing, knows exactly why this is stupid.
They are called call progression tones, aka SIT and most certainly are present in North America. I explicitly do not enable ring in Asterisk until at least one device actually rings (ACD queue or IVR). It also allows for terminating calls with zap/reorder/whatever.
Can we _PLEASE_ stop putting kids in charge of tech companies? Thank you.
You pay FedEx to ship a package to BFE Nebraska. FedEx updates the tracking info to show the package delivered, but they really just tossed it in a dumpster because the didn't feel like driving that far.
They (the actual humans who work there) also know that annual bonuses are profit driven, and that those bonuses are rarely clawed back when it turns out those profits were delivered along with a ticking time bomb hidden under the floor boards.
Executive bonuses can be fabulously remunerative. Gaming internal performance metrics is also open season.
These slap-on-the-corporate-wrist punishments would work so much better if they mandated executive malfeasance bonus repatriation.