four
5,087 posts
msg #143247
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4/17/2018 7:25:45 PM
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/fcc-dings-t-mobile-40m-181023140.html
FCC dings T-Mobile $40M for faking rings on calls that never connected
Devin Coldewey,TechCrunch Mon, Apr 16 2:10 PM EDT
T-Mobile will pay $40 million as part of a settlement with the FCC for playing ringing sounds to mislead customers into thinking their calls were going through when in fact they had never connected in the first place. The company admitted it had done so "hundreds of millions" of times over the years.
The issue at hand is that when someone is trying to call an area with poor connectivity, it can sometimes take several seconds to establish a line to the other party — especially if a carrier itself does not serve the area in question and has to hand off the call to a local provider. That's exactly what T-Mobile was doing, and there's nothing wrong with it — just a consequence of spotty coverage in rural areas.
But what is prohibited is implying to the caller that their call has gone through and is ringing on the other end, if that's not the case. Which is also exactly what T-Mobile was doing, and had been doing since 2007. Its servers began sending a "local ring back tone" when a call took a certain amount of time to complete around then.
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