A thing that never was: ringback tones | Hacker News Reader

A thing that never was: ringback tones

rioleo.org

18 pointsjustnearme18 comments

I remember ringbacks something like this;

One day several years ago I noticed the number of calls I was getting was going down. Then one day a friend texted me asking what was wrong with my phone, I asked what he meant and he said it had stopped ringing when ever he called me and all it did was play music now. He was rather confused, and I was just as confused but skeptical too, I requested no change in service. I asked him to come over to demonstrate and sure enough there was a song that would play whenever someone called me. I figure most people thought that meant some kind of error and hung up, most of the time before it hit my phone.

I called my carrier and angrily complained and the poor woman tried to pass this off as a service, but I was having none of it. I demanded that they disable it immediately and I apologized to friends and family who were confused by it. Nearly switched carriers over it as well, this is preposterous IMO and was executed with very little forethought.

Shortly afterwards, ringbacks disappeared entirely and I was all the happier for it. I get the sense there are multiple lessons to take from that anecdote.

Technically speaking, it's only on SS7 networks where this is a problem to implement. It's basically just playing an arbitrary media file, which is trivial in VoIP.

The interesting thing is that the original SS7 code did not have an arbitrary case programmed for the ring back tone; that is to say the original network infrastructure did not support on-demand changes to ring backs or to pull an arbitrary media file at the time of call. The solution was a box intermediating the call to stream musical media before connecting to the actual intended voice call media.

Telecom, why do stuff in softwhere when you can just add another box?

If I were designing that system that's what I would have done.

I can't think of an actual need for that ability, only the fact it could be used for novelty, abused to annoy people, or just flat out cause problems (i.e. what if my ringback tone is a busy signal?)

> (i.e. what if my ringback tone is a busy signal?)

My father used to take the handset off the hook during important family meetings. Anyone who called during that time got a busy signal. This was long before ringback tones were a thing.

I've also heard of a similar technique being used to fight telemarketers a few years ago. Many telemarketers run a program that automatically detects nonexistent numbers and removes them from the list. So this guy made an app to imitate the phone company's 404 error msg (or whatever the audio equivalent is) whenever he received a call from a known telemarketer. I don't know whether he did it with a ringback tone or just played an mp3 after picking up, but anyway, he no longer received any calls from telemarketers after a while.

You make me feel old. Yes, it was in the late '90s and early 2000's that you could buy the Telezapper. It was a little box that connected between the wall jack and your phone and played the little three-tone "number disconnected" sound whenever you picked up your phone. The telemarketer's computer would then (so they said) register your number as disconnected and they would never call you back. If a human called they would hear the tone too and sometimes hang up right away thinking they had mis-dialed. Small price to pay to get rid of telemarketer calls, though :-)

Found it! http://www.k3pgp.org/telezap.htm

Another trick was to play the fax tone. But as the link above says, you risked getting spam faxes if you played the fax tone.

It's used as a cheap way to implement a school closing hotline where people all call to receive the same message.

You came up with something, I'm impressed. I don't think that would be the best way to implement that but it's a sane idea and one more than I had.

Edit: after reading more in the thread, I see you actually ENCOUNTERED this. Why do it this way? Would it somehow be cheaper because you don't have to 'answer' the calls and hold the lines open?

It really boils down to money. When the call connects, somebody gets charged. Perhaps both of you do -- you lose a minute on your cellphone bill, and the school gets charged a minute for the phone call.

Putting the school notice in the RBT space eliminates this charge and essentially makes the entire transaction "free."

Lots of big companies use this for the first step in their automated attendants. Since DTMF (phone number signals) are transmitted during the ringback tone (but voice is not), they can put the first step of their attendant in the RBT space. This saves them the money if you never get any further, or decide to hang up soon after.

The settlement agreements for calls are pretty straightforward (Sending party pays). Consumers are also billed for service, but behind the scenes there's a wholesale market where traffic imbalances are valuable (this is also a core issue with Net Neutrality; consider that at peak Netflix is 35% of global bandwidth which is mostly delivered by one provider: cogent).

There's a whole different discussion around signaling and abusing both headers and early media transfers to avoid billing. It's still very largely the wild west, IMHO.

Truthfully, regarding call connect charges, ringback, per-minute fees, etc... I don't think many folks think much about the fact that a lot of the business and billing decisions driving modern telecom policy are still rooted in the same thought patterns they were in the 1950s. It drives the net neutrality debates, it drives shareholder profit expectations, everything.

And I agree - it's absolutely the wild west. After 70 years of doing it one way, we're starting to see a tipping point of new realtime infrastructures and technologies. Unfortunately, I think it's likely to become even more wild as the "silo-ification of communication" trend continues. Boo.

Don't get me started on credit card processing fees. ;)

I found out about ring-back tones by accident when I was trying to use Twilio to write an app to call an automated snow closing hotline record the message and then tweet if there was a closing. When ever I called with twilio the call _always_ failed and after contacting twilio support and they couldn't figure out what was going on either I just sort of put it on the back burner for a while. Then the next winter season rolled around again and a bunch of co-workers were complaining about how they couldn't call the snow closing hotline from their Google Voice enabled phones. Someone who worked with the people who had implemented the system went to ask how it worked and discovered it used a ring-back tone to play the message. At this point I realized why Twilio always thought the call failed since you can't start scripting a call in Twilio until it is actually answered.

I live in Indonesia and I can vouch that ring-back-tones are not just alive but also remain very profitable.

When you call a person with a RBT there is first a message saying "If you want this tone for 10cents please press 7", then the music starts, usually the latest chart-song.

Needless to say it has a solid customer base made up mostly of teens, but also of corporates with a company jingo as the RBT (I kid you not).

Im not sure if the big chat apps (will dominate VoiP) have this function built in yet but Id imagine they will at some stage, a nice VAS if you can charge for it..

I'm pretty sure this was incredibly popular in China around 2005. Pick your favourite artists song and pay for it with existing phone credit. Then force your family and friends to listen each time they call...

The U.S. market for straight ringback tones was really hampered by lack of competent marketing, poor (and as josh2600 said: annoyingly over-complicated, Telecom-mentality driven) implementation, and a complete lack of inter-carrier cooperation in the VAS space. Too bad - like Indonesia, it's quite huge in Latin America and many other parts of the world.

Ring Plus is still working with that technology - but now does a lot with reverse ringback tones; rbts based on what you want/prefer to hear, not what the person you're calling wants you to hear. It's now a mobile phone MVNO in the U.S using reverse RBTs to deliver a Spotify/Rdio/Pandora-style radio feed that goes towards subsidizing or eliminating your phone bill.

This was huge in New Zealand for a while in the mid 2000s - I have no idea how you'd sign up for it nowadays, but sometimes I'll call somebody and still hear a tinny rendition of I Believe In A Thing Called Love before they pick up.

Yeah, if I called someone and heard an ad, I would never ever call that person again. I don't need anymore ads in my life, thanks.

these are huge in China

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