India’s missed call culture | Hacker News Reader

India’s missed call culture

gigaom.com

131 pointssytelus89 comments

This reminds me of when I was going to college (1988-1991) and the "Collect Call" system was becoming automated (all landlines) - with a collect call, it would be the recipient who would pay the charges, _if they accepted_. The automated system would give you a chance to say your name, and then it would play a message to the recipient "You have a collect call from <Play Name that was just recorded>. Do you accept charges?"

Of course, you could say anything as your name including, "Let's go for pizza 8:00" or "Won't be able to make study group tonight" - if you said it quickly enough. The person at the other end would here the message, and then decline to receive the call.

Caller ID wasn't as common - I'm presuming the missed call culture leverage caller ID for a lot of it's signalling mechanism. (I.E. If you are a taxi, and get a call that cuts off after 1 ring from a number, it means come pick that person up. If you get 2 rings then it means call me back, etc...)

I know a few people who got really burned by the automated collect call system. The phone company (Sasktel in this case) started reviewing the recordings and charged the calls where something other than a name was used.

Charged who? The person being called? That would open them up to a pretty trivial attack - call their answering machine with something other than a name. The person calling? Usually you would do this from a pay phone (Remember those?) - so no luck there.

In my case, it was BC Tel, and I don't ever recall anyone ever getting charged throughout my college existence.

A trivial attack... like the one where you can send anyone at all any number of text messages, and THEY have to pay to receive them?

(This is how text messages work in the USA.)

I've always wondered about that. In the US, could I send someone I hated $100,000 worth of text messages and plunge them into debt?

It differs between different networks, but when I send a message from my Virgin Mobile in the US, I pay along with the recipient.

Mobile tariffs in the US, especially pay as you go, make me feel lucky to live in Britain.

(I'm a Brit living in the US.)

There is nothing nefarious or stupid going on in the US. In most other countries in the world there is a separate area code for mobile phones. Calling a mobile phone area code is considerably more expensive than calling a land line (for the caller). To get an idea of the difference lookup rates for any international calling card. For example the first one I found charges 1c per minute to UK landlines and 5c per minute to UK cellular. For many countries there is a 1:10 difference in cost.

So now we have established that calls involving a cellular endpoint are more expensive virtually everywhere. In places that have a separate area code for cells it will be the caller paying the additional cost.

In the US (and elsewhere participating in the North American Numbering Plan) it would be virtually impossible to allocate new area codes, so there is no way of knowing the recipient is a cellular phone. The only practical way of dealing with this is to make the recipient pay the extra which is exactly what happens. But someone is always paying! And a lot of people don't mind this, especially when mobile service was new. If you were a plumber on the go you didn't want people to think about calling a competitor on a landline while you had a cell because it was more expensive. Having all calls cost the same significantly reduces friction for people who want to communicate.

Because the recipient is paying for incoming calls and that person is making the purchase of the incoming minutes there is very strong pricing competition. Incoming and outgoing minutes are relatively very cheap in the US. So much so that the carriers have to nickel and dime people on everything else in order to make up the necessary ARPU.

love India!

It should be feasibly possible. All the US carriers maintain email to SMS gateways, so with a sufficiently large amount of computers spamming one email address, you could cause some harm.

Several years ago in Turkmenistans first 5 seconds of the call was free. While I was in high school, we were using that feature as a radio.: A: I am in canteen(hang up) B: Coming(hang up) A: Bring chemistry book (hang up) B: Ok

We could talk like this whole day without paying a penny

Interesting, this "missed call" was used in Japan extensively in the early 2000's, mainly to ask friends in the middle of the night whether they were still awake or not (kind of like the late-night instant message to a friend who is displayed as "away").

The act was called "One-Giri" (Giri is a conjugated form of "Kiru" which means to cut or hang up, in the case of a phone call)

But not anymore? What happened?

This missed call phenomena is fairly common in Sweden amongst children and teens with prepaid cards/plans.

I believe that during that time, text messages were charged per character (and hence an alternative to the "missed call" was to send a text message with one character - or perhaps it was even zero characters). I don't think regular data plans or messages/month plans existed back then (or at the least, were not prevalent)

Now, data plans are the norm and many users have unlimited (non-internet) data plans and can text message indiscriminately. Limited data plans do exist, but because the "culture" has shifted towards proper messaging, people no longer send empty messages or use missed calls)

(For some reference, I don't think Japan had unlimited bandwidth internet of any kind in the late 90's, while U.S. users at least had the option of dial up unlimited monthly internet access; Earthlink, for one. The lack of a fixed cost cellphone message plan is thus in line with their overall telecommunication tradition)

If there are any users who lived in Japan and is more knowledgeable about the subject than I am, I will gladly be corrected.

i used to do that with my wife when i was a teenager =)

There is a HUGE market here for someone to create a free texting app that encodes each character in the length of time before the call has been ended (like morse code, but with no dots, only dashes).

The application would abstract the handshake+message delivery away and hopefully would find ways to reliably send a character in hundred milliseconds, instead of seconds.

If the application becomes successful, you would have live with being the one to make carriers the world over to begin charging when a phone BEGINS ringing, instead of a successful connection. (or remove the loophole in another way, like charge on the 3rd attempt.)

Alternatively don't send individual characters, from a single call the user can choose one of 5-10 default messages (preset or mutually-agreed-upon-inadvance) like "OK" "Be there in 5 minutes" "No" etc via the length of a single call using a mobile phone application.

You can have entire conversations via mobile for free :D

Would you be able to do this at the app level? Maybe I don't know about it enough but I'm thinking you would need to have direct access to the radio to encode the paging signal. Then wouldn't the base station have to understand our different tones so it can preserve them in order to pass them on?

cool idea tho

Encode the positive integer (index of the preset message) in the length of the ringing:

1 second before cutting = OK

2 seconds before cutting = Be there in 5 minutes

3 seconds before cutting = No

4 seconds before cutting = ?

5 seconds before cutting = haha

... etc

It would be much easier to do between friends (understand they are sending a message, not phoning you) but a well coded application could disable its vibrate+ringtone on ALL incoming calls by say, 3 seconds and the message can be placed in that window (so the user doesn't accidentally pick it up thinking it's a call).

There are many ways to do it. A well thought out version can become immensely popular.

Oh right! I mistook your original post for a completely different scheme. Don't know why but I was thinking about encoding data in a single call by reencoding the paging signal.

Your idea is much more feasible and actually kinda cool.

> If the application becomes successful, you would have live with being the one to make carriers the world over to begin charging when a phone BEGINS ringing, instead of a successful connection. (or remove the loophole in another way, like charge on the 3rd attempt.)

They could also start messing up your careful timing. Then it would be much harder to convey information.

Some Indian providers already do this.

This sounds like a terrific idea in theory, but I'm not sure if the times can be measured that precisely. I may be wrong, but try calling your landline phone from your cell phone, and you'll see what I mean.

Here in Portugal I remember people using "missed calls", particularly some years ago (when calls where much more expensive) with a code: one missed call to say 'yes', two missed calls to say 'no'.

You can make this robust by using a double-SIM phone at either end. If both parties have one, you can easily get two bits per missed call, as there are four ways for Alice to call Bob.

We were doing this 30 years ago in the US, usually when someone's flight landed and they needed a ride.

You initiate a collect call and tell the operator a bogus name. Operator calls home and the call is rejected. Ride is on it's way. It got a little easier in the 80s when the system got automated and Mom would get a collect call from "COMEPICKMEUPATUNITEDDOORSEVEN"

A phenomenon I noticed in certain Latin American countries: there are vendors walking around and on every street corner advertising "Minutos" who carry a set of mobile phones on strings which they will rent to you. The main reason is that calls between phones on the same network are much cheaper, so it enables people to own a single phone and dodge the higher inter-network charges when making calls.

Do cell phone minutes work differently in India? I was under the impression that I pay for minutes on my phone even when receiving a call. In which case I don't understand how hanging up after the first ring only to have someone call me back would save anything.

In Australia, the idea of paying to receive calls is rediculous. Sure, it's not quite like that on the carrier end. But we consumers only pay when making calls.

Same in UK. Was surprised at North American system!

Same here in Norway. I think most (all) European countries do the same.

The only exception is if you are in another country. In that case the caller only pays as if the call was domestic, and the other has to pay the extra costs. The providers are required to allow you to set a maximum limit on your costs for your phone use outside your country, so you can't be surprised by huge bills.

The limits are regulated by the EU law and include Internet access (data transfer).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission_roaming_re...

Nope, in India you only pay for the calls you make. I was actually surprised by your system, where you can make someone pay by just calling.

It gets worse. You can even get charged for receiving a text message.

And you have to pay the cell phone company to block numbers (in Canada).

Really? Why do North Americans put up with being the only ones in the world to pay for receiving a call???

What recourse do we have? All the NA cell carriers do it, so we can't vote with our feet.

Because North Americans know that when they call somebody they pay a single, predefined rate to call that person: the rate from their location to the destination area code.

I don't have to know if I'm calling a mobile or a landline. In fact, a lot of people in the US pay a flat rate to any number in ANY area code in the country.

Let me pick a country I call often from my plan's list. Germany. I see two rates for landlines (49 for Telekom and 49115 for civil services), and then six rates for mobiles based on five major carriers and a sixth catch-all that is 5 times more than the others.

For kicks, let's look up India. Nice. 18 rates.

That's … not how it actually works if you are in Germany. Typically you get a flatrate or minutes to landline and two prices for mobile calls: One for calls to your carrier, one for calls to other carriers. You might, for examle, have 120 minutes for calls to people with your carrier and 19 cent/minute to other carriers (and if you go over the 120 minutes).

It's actually not so complicated, but it's certainly often a good idea to know which carrier someone is using when you are calling them on the mobile phone. There are, however, also plans that treat all carriers the same.

In Canada you generally pay long-distance rates (~$0.40/minute) when you: -Call a number with a different area code (and sometimes the same one because some area codes are very large and actually have multiple zones) -When you call a number in your own area code but you aren't in that area code (when you're in another city) -Receiving calls when you're outside of your area code

Most people are on multi-year contracts with substantial break frees (in the $200 range). There are also charges to change your number and so on and so on...

Uh, here in Portugal I pay exactly the same - 8 eurocents/min - for any network, both mobile and landline. And we don't pay for receiving calls.

If I have a cell phone number in Toronto, move to Montreal, and call somebody across the street in Montreal... I pay the rate from Toronto to Montreal.

I know because I was surprised with $400 cell phone bills maxing out my credit cards after a few months over there, thinking the exact same thing, that I paid "the rate from their location to the destination area code" - which we do not.

You pay for receiving a call too. You just pay differently. Nothing's free.

There's no "paying" vs. "not paying" conflict here.

In a sense, you are right. However, US and Canadian total average bills are far Higher and have more probability to be much higher than the contract fee. In the EU, mobile operators have had legislation forcing then to simplify and lower call costs. In the developing world, costs and fee models are whole orders cheaper.

I have no problem about the cost of buying a local mobile anywhere I travel in the world, the the US being the exception (have not yet travelled to Canada, which is shameful as I have family and friends there).

I found the comment of all the US carriers operating the same policy and therefore not being able to walk away. Surely that is grounds enough for a complaint about price fixing, using the rest of the world as a case study?

One huge advantage of our system in the US is that it gives us a good excuse to scream bloody murder when legislators try to pass bills allowing telemarketers to call cell phones. (This just happened, as a matter of fact.) If incoming calls were free, cell phones would become a lot less usable due to telemarketing spam.

In Sweden, you can join a list of numbers that marketers can't call. And with TrueCaller, it's pretty easy to screen marketers. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but your system is just crazy.

There is a Do-Not-Call registry in India; where you can register your number if you do not want telemarketing calls.

Can I register my UK number with them. The standard way to avoid the UK Do-Not-Call registry appears to be to enlist an Indian call centre to make the call for you (and spoof the number too - though why the phone company even routes calls with spoofed caller ID I'm not quite sure.)

That's not really an advantage. If service providers and marketers were regulated reasonably, you wouldn't have to pay for receiving calls AND you could prevent telemarketers from calling you.

Here in Finland there's a number you can call to register your phone on a do-not-call list. It doesn't stop all callers I guess, but I have had no telemarketing calls since registering about a year ago, so it is pretty effective. I do get an SMS or two from my service provider every few months, but I'm not bothered enough to do something about it.

The UK has a similar system. It's pretty effective. the loophole is that telemarketers are not allowed to call, but market researchers are allowed to call.

Plus, in Australia at least, the calling party pays a premium to call the mobile phone (essentially charged at a long distance rate, to a separate 'mobile phone' area code). So in reality, spam callers self regulate anyway: they know what area codes are mobiles and they know that those area codes will cost them.

Thanks to recent rule for telemarketers in India, we get almost zero telemarketing calls/sms if we register for do not call service. My phone was surprisingly silent from the day this rule came into effect. Ironically, this whole thing was proposed and pushed through by government because our finance minister got a telemarketing call offering a personal loan when he was debating about some thing in parliament :D

The US and Canada are the only countries I know of where you pay for spam (as in, pay when receiving a call or a text).

There might be others, but in advanced economies (at least) the concept is generally found ludicrous.

Add Singapore to the list.

Mobile pricing in Canada is entirely mental. The charges carriers charge here is crazy compared to europe or asia. I had hoped that when we went from 3 to 6+ carriers things would improve, but they haven't. :(

Mobilicity has $12.50/month unlimited calling plans now... I wouldn't say things haven't improved. If you use the upstart carriers you're paying a lot less. What hasn't happened is that Rogers or Bell or Telus have reduced their prices to match. Presumably they are anticipating that at some point they can simply acquire the new carriers and fold them in, like Fido or Virgin Mobile.

There's also the catch in the US system.

When you hear the message saying 'blah blah, leave a message after the tone'. Those seconds are charged to the caller.

Add up all those millions of seconds and the networks are rolling.

We all know what to do when the person is not there. I don't need to hear a 15 second message telling me yet again what to do.

I think it was David Pogue who wrote something up on this: press "1 * #" in that order, slowly, listening after each press. Depending on the carrier, you'll skip the message eventually.

This happens in most countries - I think it's Vodafone in the UK which reads out the recipient's phone number very slowly before letting you leave a voicemail.

It goes something like "Welcome to the Vodafone voicemail messaging service for 0... 7... 7... 4... 5... 9... [the rest of the number]... the person you have called is unable to answer the phone right now. Please leave a message after the tone."

Call me presumptuous, but I know the number of the person I've just called, and don't really need to know how to use an answerphone.

I know why missed calls work for personal use.

But the use case described just sounds like an 800 number replacement. A better solution would be to have an 800 number than a missed call feature that calls you back do you don't have to pay.

Except if the cost of the 800 number incoming calls is more than the cost of however you can minimise your outgoing calls.

There was a similar situation in Australia where long-distance phone card providers wanted to ensure their relevancy in an age of decreased landline connections. Mobile phone calls to 800 numbers still cost the caller money and the reciever (which is why the telcos agreed this year to exempt counselling hotlines).

So instead they decided to setup hotline mobile phone connections to enter your phone card details, thus taking advantage of inside-same-network free calling. The telcos had none of it and just charged premium rates for those specific normal looking mobile phone numbers. I bet Indian telcos will be looking to do the same anytime soon.

800 numbers cost minutes. In India, incoming is free for the most part.

A company having a free-to-call telephone number has to recoup the cost of those calls somehow.

When people have very little money (they don't want to spend money on a text message, not because they are skinflints but because they are poor) there's little chance to upsell goods to recoup the cost.

But i guess the networks more than make up for it by having a huge margin for sms. They shouldn't really complain.

I always thought most mobile operators offered a "please call me" service? In South Africa, you can send a 'message' using USSD (ie *140#<number>) to let someone know that they should call you. You have a limit of 100 a day or something.

Is this common in other countries as well? (Clearly not in India?)

I have never heard of this in scandinavia.

Network providers should think upon decreasing the cost of SMS instead of complaining about missed calls. It would give them the opportunity to monetise as well as free up the network to some extent.

And as for the 'missed call' culture, it's either used mostly by students or the poor peoples (a bitter truth of most Indians), in either of the case, it is mostly likely that none of them uses smart phones that can handle applications as mentioned in the comments here.

SMS expanded from "minimal messaging that utilised slack space in the system" to "primary use of the system for many people".

There could and should be a way to get free, minimal messaging, sent as the system has free space, working. That could be used alongside modern sms and mms systems.

When I was in the USA travelling and wanted to call someone on Skype back in the UK, I used the ring once hang up technique to signal for them to get logged onto Skype or text me back to say they cannot. When inthe USA on a UK mobile, it's about $1.50 per minute to make a call, and $0.50 to send a text. It's free to receive texts though so this hack let me communicate basically for free.

I remember doing this as a teenager when we all started getting mobile phones (England). At first it was just to annoy people, we'd call it "pranking", where you'd call someone and hang-up before they answered; but later it evolved into a "I have no credit, please call me back" signal.

The phenomenon seemed to die off pretty much exactly at the same time as when everyone got jobs and/or money.

In the developed world (except the US and Canada) voice calls are cheap and inclusive. Kids in the UK have phones for £10 a month, happily funded by parents, and they either hit a limit and have to top up or have enough inclusive minutes.

The developing world isn't going to be so quick to hand over its hard earned money to big corporates. The apps designed around missed calls as a communicative action are genius: you could use it in a variety of services: "Miss call Dominoes and we will send you your regular order within 30 minutes.... Could cause havoc too :) ( maybe need a railways return call to double check the order, on second thoughts...)

Maybe we are missing a trick here with consumers? A missed call is faster and more convenient than a text message... Would be a great marketing or polling tool

I think that as consumers our reflex is to send a text when a missed call might be faster/more convenient. For example, if I'm picking up a friend, I'll text "I'm here" or "here", whereas I could simply make a missed call and my friend sees that it's me on the display and goes outside because she's expecting me.

Making a missed call would just not occur to me, but when I moved to Lithuania for a few years it became a habit because that's what everyone does over there (and in other places where there is a missed call culture and people have several cell phones to take advantage of cheap/free calling plans within a given carrier network). It's faster by a few seconds than sending a text or calling the person and telling them.

Once you're in the missed call mindset, you see all kinds of situations where you can use it, but until you get in the mindset, the reflex will be to send a text or make a call.

Interesting as I don't think this would hurt the overall phone business as someone is always paying for the return call. However, I suppose this would tip in favor mainly of the landline companies and would be cutting profits from cell companies.

Keeps the networks super busy without paying for it.

The article mentions average phone revenue in India, and I'm not sure if it was trying to make the link or not, but the missed call culture shouldn't affect overall Indian cell revenue rates too much since someone ends up paying for the call. Exceptions would be phoning outside the country and the receiver having different rates than the sender.

Of course it makes a difference if, say, everyone using missed calls were with the same company. Then that company would fail...

Perhaps a solution (assuming one is desired) is for businesses to offer toll free numbers such that cell phone calls to them are payed for by them?

Maybe I'm missing something here, but isn't the case such that when you place a call and immediately hang up, no one pays for that call, although unnecessary traffic is caused for the operator? In some of these cases the receiver might call back, and then that second call is paid for. But if this is really a culture in India, then the operators lines are used a lot all the time, even though no one is paying for these one ring calls.

Yes, I do assume no-one pays for the missed call. But as you say, the receiver pays for the subsequent return call, whereas otherwise, the original sender would have paid. Either way, assuming a call happens, someone pays, so if the article is implying this costs the Indian cell industry as a whole money, I'm not sure it's really true. Sure, increased overhead on the system is an issue, plus the exceptions I noted.

I have read similar articles a few years back. The "missed call culture" as people put it has been there for quite sometime, since the mobile revolution in India. However I would say one reason for this might be that voice mail is hardly used in India - if someone's phone is unreachable or switched off - when you try calling them, you hear a recorded message saying the other person is unreachable - unlike in the US when a lot of times you are just redirected to the receiver's voice mail box. I happen to be not very fond of voice mail :(

I wonder if there is (or soon will be) an Android app / dialer that lets you "call" people with a missed call. Based on the little international number dialer I use (substituting a cheaper dialing code for + according to your instructions), you'd be able to support general dialing actions (e.g. dialing a phone number recognized in an email or web page) and might even be able to adjust the call log so you see a single outbound call, rather than a "missed call" and its response separately. I can see that being fairly useful.

When leaving my grandparents' house for a long journey home, everybody was always instructed to give three rings when they get home safely. To this day I always let a phone ring three times before answering, partly in case it's an "I'm OK" message and partly because waiting for somebody to answer gives the caller time to think what they actually want to say.

My grandparents didn't have caller ID and so had no idea who was telling them they'd got home safely, but they could guess based on timings pretty well.

This works much less well in the days of digital call signalling. The "ringback tone" you hear -- the ringing in your earpiece when you call someone -- no longer corresponds in any way to the ring being generated on the other end. Ringback can start before or after ringing, so you can't even count on the number of seconds being the same, let alone the number of rings.

I disagree with the author, I don't talk about those miser souls who think they can save enough money by these miss calls, but if you are specially talking about that miserable 'poor', the post is targeted for, understand now that a proper call is more appropriate than making just a miss call. If some of you are aware of mixed culture of urban and rural india in towns and small cities, then it's a norm for a taxi/auto [cab] drivers to make calls for their customers (I am not talking about professional cab companies, who provide cellphones to their drivers). Vegetable salespersons, electricians, plumbers .. there is a long list of these, it was an era when they were used to miss calls, but they will rather make a call today. However my take on this post is based on what I am observing in my surroundings, may be statistics say something else. The other reason of making a proper call can go like this : some telephone companies in India sell their sim 'free' and you get starting free talk time of 30/50/100 INR, these sim are sold in wholesale(obviously targeted for conversions ), if not free then they are there for nominal charges. Barrier to entry for making a call is very less, it is used for free talk time,internet(with indian speed) then some trash the sim, some of them don't mind making a local call on tariff like 1 paisa per second . [ 1 Rupees = 100 Paisa ]

Even now (after the long distance call cost has drastically come down), when ever I receive a call from my parents, I instinctively cut it (making it a missed call for them) and call them back :). In last two years increased competition among telecom players pushed down costs so low that in a few years missed calls may not mean much...

It's a shame this doesn't mention Zipdial http://zipdial.com

This is also common in Africa.

As as well as in the Dominican Republic, from my experience.

This behavior existed since early 90s in Lebanon.

"Necessity is the mother of invention"

Tyler Durden: I *69 you, I never pick up my phone.

Indian: I missed called you, I never call from my phone.

poke

What is the average lifetime value of a customer too cheap to send a text message?

What is the average lifetime value of a customer too "cheap" to buy a full bottle of shampoo? The people who want that business sell sachets of shampoo. It's a model that works.

I guess if people are spending money sending text messages that's money that they're not spending on my business.

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