T-Mobile To Pay $40 Million Over False Ring Tones on Rural US Calls (reuters.com) 77
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."
False ring tones? (Score:4)
What the hell is a false ring tone? My phone rings because T-Mobile asked it to?
Re:False ring tones? (Score:5, Informative)
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Didn't think it was that uncommon. That was a problem when people thought that the phones on a downed airline [nbcnews.com] were still ringing for some reason.
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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.
Thanks, but why wouldn't the call just go to voicemail in those cases? (assuming voicemail was setup and enabled)
Re:False ring tones? (Score:4, 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.
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How would it make them seem like they have a larger coverage area? These are T-Mobile customers calling rural telephones that are handled by other carriers, such as landlines or non T-Mobile mobile phones.
The article mentions that it has something to do with handing calls over to lower rate intermediaries who are supposed to complete the calls. This may not be entirely T-Mobile's fault.
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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.
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The article doesn't even specify whether the T-mobile customer was the caller or the callee who couldn't be reached. Lots of passive voice and non-specific wording.
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The recorded message could say the device is unavailable and then redirect to voicemail...
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That's absolutely right. And because they didn't, they were fined
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That's absolutely right. And because they didn't, they were fined
Seems pretty dumb, especially with the $40M fine. First-world company problems ... :-)
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They were trying to cover up that their customers weren't actually getting service they were paying for. They collected more than $40M from affected rural customers in service fees - totally fair.
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executive malfeasance bonus repatriation (Score:2)
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-co
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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
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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.
But my understanding is you're not charged for the call unless it is answered. We're they charging people for these calls? Otherwise, why the $40 million dollar penalty?
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The most "corporate" reason for doing it - and getting fined for it - that I can find is:
If someone calls a rural area T-Mobile pays the receiving carrier. A lot of these are a scam and charge extremely high rates.
It's also, basically, a lie. If you hear a ring, you expect that the other person's phone is ringing. If it isn't, that's false information, regardless of whether the customer ends up paying for the call or not.
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.”
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That is not the original meaning of Ring tone [wikipedia.org]. This refers to the sound a caller hears after dialing and thinks your phone is ringing.
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If someone calls a rural area T-Mobile pays the receiving carrier. A lot of these are a scam and charge extremely high rates.
Probably illegal not to route these calls, so T-Mobile found another way
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But still a bit disconcerting as this is very common practice in telecom. I work with telecom VOIP gateways and almost all calls are SIP now and the protocols have methods that allow gateways to generate the ringing you hear before the other end connects and starts to generate the ring from the far side. This is so the caller doesn't just hea
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I suppose in this case they were fined because they were doing this in order to cover up their spotty coverage. As in it was malicious.
Other way around. They weren't playing the ringtown to people calling their customers from rural areas, they were playing the ringtone to their customers calling landlines in rural areas. read the comment you replied to again, they explained the reasoning quite aptly.
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Re: False ring tones? (Score:2)
What a terrible summary (Score:3, 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.
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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.
Tmobile... Not great out in the boondocks (Score:3)
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?
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The goal is to get T-Mobile to change their bad behavior, and if this fine gets them to do it (which, at $40M, seems like it might not...) then the goal is achieved, regardless of where the money goes.
Most of the affected people will be non-T-Mobile customers; the only identification T-Mobile have is their phone numbers. Tracking down the owner of each phone number at the time of each call and mailing out who knows how many millions of checks would likely cost more than the fine amount, at which point you w
Routing tones... (Score:5, Informative)
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There was a time the Nextel network would say "Please wait while the Nextel subscriber you called is located......... Please wait... etc" and then once the endpoint started ringing, ringing tones. It's just lazyness on the telecoms part.
They are all false (Score:1)
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
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Exactly this. Years ago, I was setting up a VOIP system over Satellite, so I wound up doing a lot of packet and event tracing between our SS7 trunk, the H.323 signalling, and listening to the phones.
My users actually complained of the dead air when they initially dialed, as the satellite adds just over 550ms round-trip time to the call setup. Never mind the time to locate a cellular phone at the other end of the call.
When we dial out our Iridium satellite backup phone, it generates pips while it attempts to
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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.
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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
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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.
Wee ho (Score:2)
What are they supposed to do? (Score:2)
I guess they could c
Sounds similar. (Score:2)
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.
An analogy: (Score:2)