Carrier Fined $40M For Delivering False Ring Tones

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that T-Mobile has agreed to pay a $40 million penalty to resolve claims that it failed to fix problems completing phone calls in rural areas and used false ring tones to give the impression that calls were actually getting through, when they were not.

According to the Consent Decree, FCC rules prohibit service providers from injecting false ring tones on any telephone calls. These false ring tones cause people to believe the phone is ringing at the called party's premesis when it is not. A caller may then hang up, thinking no one is available. False ring tones also create a misleading impression that a caller's service provider is not responsible if the call fails. False ring tones are a problem on calls to rural areas and are a symptom of the problems of impaired quality and completion of calls to rural areas.

insideARM Perspective

Many have written about this consent decree today, including reaction from FCC commissioners and industry. See this Reuters article or this NPR article, for instance.

An interesting twist that I have not seen in other articles, however, is the connection (no pun intended) between this matter of completing rural phone calls -- or otherwise letting callers know when their calls cannot be completed -- and the matter of completing so-called "robocalls" to all called parties (not just those in rural areas). While the matters appear unrelated, they collectively shine a light on a new challenge for carriers to manage both old and new technology, and to achieve the appropriate level of transparency for legitimate (and potentially illegitimate) callers.

insideARM recently published an article on this topic by Karl Koster titled, "Are Your Calls Being Blocked? If They Are, How Would You Know?" In it, he argues,

"We should know exactly how our calls are being treated. If carriers do not agree to provide accurate per-call blocking information, the only solution is to petition the FCC to regulate the carriers on this matter. Certainly, any safe harbor the FCC is considering should be predicated on carriers providing a per-call blocking indication. Let’s stop the “fake busies” now."

So we now have protests about both "fake rings" and "fake busies." A coalition of industry groups, carriers, regulators, consumer advocates, and analytics companies (software providers that help carriers and consumers to determine which calls to block or label) has been meeting regularly to address the issues related to completing wanted and unwanted calls. As the recent policy forum jointly hosted by the FTC and the FCC demonstrated, the problems are a long way from being solved.