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T-Mobile To Pay $40 Million Over False Ring Tones on Rural US Calls (reuters.com)

Posted by msmash on from the calling-out dept.

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."

9 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. False ring tones? by ArchieBunker · · Score: 3

    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
    1. Re:False ring tones? by cogeek · · Score: 5, Informative

      From the article, it's when a cell phone is not in range of service but someone calling it still hears a ring tone as though it's ringing on the other end of the line, rather than a "that device is not available currently. Please try back later" message.

    2. Re:False ring tones? by omnichad · · Score: 2

      That is not the original meaning of Ring tone. This refers to the sound a caller hears after dialing and thinks your phone is ringing.

    3. Re:False ring tones? by omnichad · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Because you're fraudulently leading the person to believe that there's no problem with the T-mobile customer's signal/reception and that they are just not answering.

    4. Re:False ring tones? by omnichad · · Score: 2

      You're right. But the article doesn't actually say this except indirectly.

      Here is the quote from the actual FCC report that explains it much better than any of the articles that were written without digging at all:

      7. Beginning in June and continuing through the summer of 2016, the Commission received
      complaints from three rural incumbent LECs in Wisconsin. These complaints, which were filed in the
      Commission’s rural call completion e-mail box, alleged over 40 incidents in which T-Mobile customers
      were unable to complete calls to consumers served by these three rural providers. Many of the complaints
      reported that the calling party heard ring tones on call attempts that failed to reach the rural customers.
      The Enforcement Bureau (Bureau) served these complaints on T-Mobile and requested that the Company
      contact the complainants, investigate and resolve the problems, and submit reports of its investigations to
      the Bureau. In two instances, the Bureau pointed out to T-Mobile that the Commission’s rules prohibit
      sending ring tones to the calling party before the called party is alerted to an incoming call.

      8. T-Mobile subsequently filed with the Bureau reports of its investigations of the
      complaints. In each instance, T-Mobile reported that it had handed the call off to an intermediate
      provider for delivery, and that any reported problems had been “resolved.” T-Mobile stated that it
      believed that the actions taken by intermediate providers in response to each complaint had remedied all
      problems and did not specifically address the ring tone issue raised in some of the complaints.

  2. What a terrible summary by MikeDataLink · · Score: 2, Informative

    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!
  3. Tmobile... Not great out in the boondocks by Virtucon · · Score: 2

    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"
  4. Routing tones... by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:executive malfeasance bonus repatriation by epine · · Score: 2

    Furthermore, in game theoretic terms, the upside is all the unethical scams combined, and the downside is only those which you eventually get caught (and these with a fat net-present-value depreciation term).

    This is why the controlling stakeholders set up bonus conditions that the senior executive ranks can game to their personal advantage.

    The fines on the ones you don't get away with simply aren't large enough (historically) to deter a general ethos of catch while catch can.

    It's an extremely tough problem in mechanism design how to incentivize executives to cut the legal corners where the aggregate ROI is positive, without incentivizing the executives to cut the rare, extremely dangerous legal corner where the ROI is a nightmare on wheels (Volkswagon might be in this later camp, although set against that, the threat to their diesel consumer franchise had they not cheated was possibly existential).

    The stakeholders have a severe oversight problem, because you want plausible deniability on the upside scam, which makes it hard to formally poke into what the management team is doing (leaving actual breadcrumbs behind) when you suspect they might be playing more than a little over the edge.

    Breaking the law just right: priceless.

    That's why they make the big bucks.