3 ms·

In that time, the caller will often still hear a "ringing" tone. actually this was surprising (and news) to me: I'm in Belgium, and I don't think this ever occ

by stinos 13y ago

In that time, the caller will often still hear a "ringing" tone. actually this was surprising (and news) to me: I'm in Belgium, and I don't think this ever occurred to me. If the phone is not found (as in, truned off), you don't get any ringing. Just some silence followed by either voicemail or some message saying the correspondent is unreachable and then voicemail.

josh2600 13y ago
This is true for calls inside your home network. When you place a call to an on-net device, the network knows almost instantaneously if you're available or not. Let's say you're roaming: how does your home network know how to reach you? Without going into a lot of detail, that information has to be relayed from your roaming carrier to your core carrier. Most likely, the ringing you hear is the border of the home network waiting for a response from the last registered roaming partner network. As in all cases, every tone you hear on the network these days is just an arbitrary audio file and has nothing to do with network operation today. Phones ringing, busy tones, etc. are all relics held over from the old days to make people feel better and more comfortable.
DSMan195276 13y ago
Well it's worth keeping in mind that the ringing you hear is coming from the cell-phone tower / service provider / etc. and not the called person's phone anyway whether or not they're on the network. I don't know the specifics on how a tower determines if a phone is or isn't on the network at the current moment, but I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine that the service provider wants to appear to be fast, and thus starts playing the ringing tone immediately after the call is placed (Rather then wait). This definitely happens in the US, I can attest to that, I'm surprised to hear this doesn't happen everywhere else. At the same time, it's not like it really makes any difference one way or the other. It is a curious thing though. It seems to be like computer networks, where Ex. if you ping a non-existent address you just sit there waiting until a sufficient amount of time has gone by that you decide they aren't on the other side.

by stinos 13y ago

josh2600 13y ago

This is true for calls inside your home network. When you place a call to an on-net device, the network knows almost instantaneously if you're available or not. Let's say you're roaming: how does your home network know how to reach you? Without going into a lot of detail, that information has to be relayed from your roaming carrier to your core carrier. Most likely, the ringing you hear is the border of the home network waiting for a response from the last registered roaming partner network. As in all cases, every tone you hear on the network these days is just an arbitrary audio file and has nothing to do with network operation today. Phones ringing, busy tones, etc. are all relics held over from the old days to make people feel better and more comfortable.

DSMan195276 13y ago

Well it's worth keeping in mind that the ringing you hear is coming from the cell-phone tower / service provider / etc. and not the called person's phone anyway whether or not they're on the network. I don't know the specifics on how a tower determines if a phone is or isn't on the network at the current moment, but I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine that the service provider wants to appear to be fast, and thus starts playing the ringing tone immediately after the call is placed (Rather then wait). This definitely happens in the US, I can attest to that, I'm surprised to hear this doesn't happen everywhere else. At the same time, it's not like it really makes any difference one way or the other. It is a curious thing though. It seems to be like computer networks, where Ex. if you ping a non-existent address you just sit there waiting until a sufficient amount of time has gone by that you decide they aren't on the other side.