FCC dings T-Mobile $40M for faking rings on calls that never connected
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/16/fcc-dings-t-mobile-40m-for-faking-rings-on-calls-that-never-connected/
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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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--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lau...@vortex.com): https://www.vortex.com/lauren
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