T-Mobile fined $40M for deceiving customers with fake ring tones
fastcodesign.com
fastcodesign.com
...
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.
The fastcodesign link doesn't really add anything except a story that's not quite accurate (saying it's the signal.. which is wrong).
I hope this fine means the end of this crappy behavior. I generally like T-Mobile.
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.
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.
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".