"Here’s how it worked. Whenever a phone couldn’t establish a connection with another phone, instead of remaining silent, the calling tone would start ringing in the caller’s ear. Logically, the person placing the call believes that the phone on the other side is actually ringing but nobody is picking up.
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If you think that’s not that bad, imagine this: You’re driving through the middle of nowhere in Midwest Square State, U.S.A. Your car breaks down, your A/C is nonfunctional in the hot summer weather, and you call road assistance. The phone rings and rings, but nobody picks up. You call again. And again. It seems that everyone at road assistance must be out partying, or they just hate you. By the 27th call, you’d probably be mad enough to break the phone–all without realizing that your those rings were pure fiction, and you needed to move to find a better signal. And what if someone with you was injured, or a more serious emergency took place?"
it has nothing to do with signal strength. the fact that they were able to inject a fake ring tone, means that you were connected to the tower just fine.
the issue was that they couldn't connect the call to the other phone's telephone company and pretended it had reached it.
i.e. if you call overseas, you don't hear our ringtone, you hear whatever their ringtone is.
The arstechnica story (linked in another comment) clarifies that the ring tone was injected in T-Mobile servers for calls that went over a SIP backbone. So yes we know it was not in the user terminal.
I cannot believe that T-Mobile would remote 'Celebrite'/jailbreak/root a device just to add the necessary files and remote-execute a process to play an mp3 while the Phone-app has taken control. When the Phone-app is running, it automatically thwarts any other sound-using app (such as Spotify, Music, Skype, games)
Carriers have enormous control over devices. While we now know it didn't happen, they likely could have easily shipped a manipulated standard phone app since when a carrier gives out a device it is often running customized firmware with the carrier's logo on boot and preinstalled bloat ware like Spotify, Facebook or WPS Office (by my experience with branded os images for Sony Xperias).
I've experienced this before. It's really frustrating. You could kind of tell when it was happening because the timing of the ring was not quite right, and there would be this audible switch when the phone really started ringing. For some reason, it mostly seemed to happen when calling my brother.
I hope this fine means the end of this crappy behavior. I generally like T-Mobile.
I don't get why they did this? Did they forget about busy tones? Or did they think people would prefer a ring tone that wasn't answered? I just don't get it, it didn't exactly feel malicious.
I guess this is related to bad implementation of using SIP for connecting call. I had similar experience with local telecom provider in Turkey, which is routing international calls over cheap SIP providers. Basically they are calling a SIP route, which you hear ringing, when it starts ringing other provider starting to initiate the call.
In this case I think the cell tower is not Tmobile’s, but they have agreement with the tower owner to route call to their SIP trunk.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 72.1 ms ] thread...
If you think that’s not that bad, imagine this: You’re driving through the middle of nowhere in Midwest Square State, U.S.A. Your car breaks down, your A/C is nonfunctional in the hot summer weather, and you call road assistance. The phone rings and rings, but nobody picks up. You call again. And again. It seems that everyone at road assistance must be out partying, or they just hate you. By the 27th call, you’d probably be mad enough to break the phone–all without realizing that your those rings were pure fiction, and you needed to move to find a better signal. And what if someone with you was injured, or a more serious emergency took place?"
the issue was that they couldn't connect the call to the other phone's telephone company and pretended it had reached it.
i.e. if you call overseas, you don't hear our ringtone, you hear whatever their ringtone is.
Do we know this? The tone could have been injected by the device.
It should be noted that Obama was legally required to appoint a Republican to that slot, and took Mitch McConnell's recommendation.
Making him Chairman is an explicit vote of confidence far greater than "I have to pick someone I don't really like, might as well be this guy".
I hope this fine means the end of this crappy behavior. I generally like T-Mobile.
The fastcodesign link doesn't really add anything except a story that's not quite accurate (saying it's the signal.. which is wrong).
Why not sprinkle a lil bit of politics there, eh?
Maybe if it wasn't relevant to the story.
Pai being a former telco lobbyist, it seems pretty relevant.
In this case I think the cell tower is not Tmobile’s, but they have agreement with the tower owner to route call to their SIP trunk.
Could they charge?
Was it to look like their phones had more reception they they did?
Or just a dumb decision?