Ringback Tones Are Still In

Ever wonder what people are talking about when you hear ‘ringback tones’? Ringtones have been popular for ages, but the ‘new cellphone ringtone’ works in a slightly different way. In simple terms, when you call someone you usually will hear a beep letting you know that you have been connected and the phone is ringing – this is the ringback tone. Cellphone carriers have made it possible to customize the sound you hear to just about any song you can think of.

Another way to explain it is that it is a status indication that the number dialed is available (ie in service and not busy). This requires that the proper connections through the relevant telephony network or networks between the caller and the callee’s audio devices are either made, or are available to be made, and the phone call will be connected if the call is picked up – either by an answering service or a person.

If all goes well, then the call can either be answered by a person (as long as the called number is not busy, or if the number is busy, and the phone being called has a call waiting service which notifies the person occupying the line to hang up the call in process, or put it on hold, in order to answer the incoming call), or by an answering machine or a network-based voice processor. This is the default case if the line is busy and the user a) doesn’t have a call waiting service, or b) did not answer the incoming call within the (programmable) number of rings.

So for the audiophiles among us, in North America (United States and Canada), which are within the North American Numbering Plan (NANP), the standard PSTN ringback tone is generated by summing a 440-Hz tone with a 480-Hz tone and applying these to the telephone line – on for two seconds, off for four seconds.

The interference due to the difference in frequency between the two tones causes a 40-Hz beat, and the tone combination produces the common warbling “ring … ring … ring” sound. The ringback tone may be generated by the switch serving either the called party or the calling party, but it is not generated by the called telephone instrument or PBX. Usually the The ringback tone starts and stops in time with the phone being called, except that it is out of phase – it rings when the caller hears the pause, etc.

So what’s so great about ringback tones? Well, rather than just hearing the same old boring ‘ring’, you can change this sound that your cellphone plays when people call your cell. The cellphone companies let you set the ringback(s) you want on your phone, and will then charge your cellphone bill a per ringback charge. The most popular options are rap, pop and classical music clips, although there are some sound clips also available.

Now here is the best part – you can completely customize the ringback tones that your callers hear. What’s even cooler is that you can choose ringbacks to suit each individual caller. Generally, you can pick up to around 100 ringback tones at any given time. Each one of these can be setup so that each of your callers hear different ring back tones. The other method of setting them up is to choose a tone to suit the time of day. This is most often used so that callers hear a ‘work hours’ and a ‘non-work hours’ ringback tone.

Setting up ringback tones on your cellphone is as easy as doing a websearch for your cellphone carrier and ‘ringback tones’.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Cellphones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.