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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
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!
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"
Well that statement says nothing about whether who you are calling is being charged in addition to their monthly rate to make sure your particular call to them doesn't suck.
So he doesn't mind degraded service to you, independent of what you pay, after all.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
When that happens would you rather hear a whole lot of nothing for several long seconds
Yes.
Thankfully, that wipes out the purpose of your entire wall of text.
"His name was James Damore."
If you hear 'a whole lot of nothing' you generally (correctly) assume that the phone system is at fault. If you hear a ring tone, and nobody answers, you assume that the person just isn't answering the phone. Does it matter? Yes. If you know that the phone system is not setting up your call in a reasonable time, maybe it is time to switch carriers. But, supposing you are trying to reach someone, and they appear to be just not answering the phone. Why? If it is a business, are they too busy to answer the phone? If it is emergency services, why aren't they answering? Etc.
Luckily I have Cricket (AT&T) and it doesn't even work in my basement where the rec. room is (and me).
Let's say I am an asshole manager calling a member of my team and he never picks up the phone.
In reality he's on his way to the location but out of signal reach.
Let's assume I am calling my wife which I know was supposed to drive through a no-signal zone. I call her, get a ring tone, assume she's at home but for some reason can't answer. In reality she had an accident in the no-signal zone. I could have inferred something's wrong by getting a non-reachable tone instead of a ringing tone.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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!
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.