When Is A Ringtone Not A Ringtone? When It’s A Ringback Ringtone.

So just what are Ringback Tones? 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.

Technically, your ringback tone is a status indicator telling your caller that your line is available (ie., in service and not busy). Network connections through the telephony networks between the caller and the callee’s audio devices are either made, or will be available to be connected, and the phone call will complete.

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 tone combination produces a warbly “ring … ring … ring” sound, caused by the 40-Hz beat, or interference due to the difference in frequency, between the two tones. 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. The ringback tone generally starts and stops at the same rate as the ringing tone of the called telephone, but generally is out of phase, i.e., staggered in time.

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.

You can customize the tone played depending on the caller – it is possible to select up to 100 or so active ringback tones at any given time, each programmed so that different callers hear different tones/songs/clips, or programmed so that different tones will play dependent on the time of day.

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

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