T-Mobile to Pay $40M for Faking Rings on Calls to Rural Areas

T-Mobile on Monday agreed to pay $twoscore meg to settle a Federal Communications Commission investigation that revealed it faked the ring tones on hundreds of millions of calls to rural areas.

The shady business do non merely deceived customers but violated the FCC's rules, which prohibit service providers from injecting false ring tones on any calls.

"False ring tones cause callers to believe that the phone is ringing at the called party'southward premises when information technology is non," the FCC explained in the settlement. "A caller may and then hang up, thinking no one is bachelor to receive the phone call. False band tones besides create a misleading impression that a caller's service provider is not responsible if the call fails."

T-Mobile did non immediately respond to PCMag's request for comment most the settlement.

The FCC'due south Enforcement Agency initiated its investigation afterwards receiving complaints in the summer of 2022 that T-Mobile customers were unable to complete calls to people served by 3 rural carriers in Wisconsin. "Many of the complaints reported that the calling party heard ring tones on call attempts that failed to accomplish the rural customers," the settlement states.

The FCC requested T-Mobile investigate and correct the problem. It later on told the agency it handed the calls in question to an intermediate provider for delivery, and had resolved the reported event, simply the agency continued to receive similar complaints. Through its investigation, the FCC discovered that the problem extended to "at least seven" other rural telecom providers.

"It is a basic tenet of the nation'due south telephone system that calls exist completed to the called party, without a reduction in the call quality—even when the calls laissez passer through intermediate providers," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in a argument. "The FCC is committed to ensuring that phone calls to all Americans, including rural Americans, get through."

About Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo is PCMag'southward expert on fitness and smart home products. Teaching yoga for almost 10 years has helped her in evaluating a range of continued health products including fitness trackers, center charge per unit monitors, rowers, smart scales, stationary bikes, forcefulness grooming machines, treadmills, and more than. Angela too tests smart habitation devices from her ranch in Florida, including air purifiers, kitchen appliances, and robot vacuums, just to name a few.