trained users that lousy voice quality really was OK. Then they got people to
understand that when they were done pressing all the digits in a phone number,
they had to press some some other send key before anything would happen.
way media from the far end during the “ringback” time, and of course an
desperate attempt to try and wrap a business model around it. See
http://apnews.myway.com//article/20041129/D86LODF00.html
for a story on charging for songs that play as your custom “rickback tone”.
This of course would be a huge step
forward for the phone industry. The current approach of you hear the “busy” tone
from the country you are calling is insane. How do I know what “busy” sounds
like when I phone Antarctica. This whole practice is the exact opposite of what
Internationalization of most technology tries to achieve. When I make a call, I
should get a consistent indication of “busy” that I understand. The funny thing
is that it is incredibly difficult to achieve this useless feature and the only
argument for it is basically “that’s how it has always been done on the PSTN”
and “users would not accept any change”. People regularly tell me they actually
know tones – this seems unlikely, there are quite a few. Check out
this
list David and I did.
It’s not quite true it this early
media has no use. It is also used for basically toll fraud purposes. Many large
IVR system (1-800-gofedex being the canonical example but including many other
people like the US IRS) use it to play out the initial prompts of their IVR as
“ringback” so they can delay connecting for a little extra
time.
Update from Adam
Roach
"My reading of this is that
it affects the ringback that people hear
when
they call *you*, not the ringback
you hear when you call people. In other words, this virtually guarantees early
media for a long time, since it's now a money-making
service."
Did I mention the mobile
guys really drive me nuts.