I remember ringbacks something like this;<p>One day several years ago I noticed the number of calls I was getting was going down. Then one day a friend texted me asking what was wrong with my phone, I asked what he meant and he said it had stopped ringing when ever he called me and all it did was play music now. He was rather confused, and I was just as confused but skeptical too, I requested no change in service. I asked him to come over to demonstrate and sure enough there was a song that would play whenever someone called me. I figure most people thought that meant some kind of error and hung up, most of the time before it hit my phone.<p>I called my carrier and angrily complained and the poor woman tried to pass this off as a service, but I was having none of it. I demanded that they disable it immediately and I apologized to friends and family who were confused by it. Nearly switched carriers over it as well, this is preposterous IMO and was executed with very little forethought.<p>Shortly afterwards, ringbacks disappeared entirely and I was all the happier for it. I get the sense there are multiple lessons to take from that anecdote.
Technically speaking, it's only on SS7 networks where this is a problem to implement. It's basically just playing an arbitrary media file, which is trivial in VoIP.<p>The interesting thing is that the original SS7 code did not have an arbitrary case programmed for the ring back tone; that is to say the original network infrastructure did not support on-demand changes to ring backs or to pull an arbitrary media file at the time of call. The solution was a box intermediating the call to stream musical media before connecting to the actual intended voice call media.<p>Telecom, why do stuff in softwhere when you can just add another box?
I found out about ring-back tones by accident when I was trying to use Twilio to write an app to call an automated snow closing hotline record the message and then tweet if there was a closing. When ever I called with twilio the call _always_ failed and after contacting twilio support and they couldn't figure out what was going on either I just sort of put it on the back burner for a while. Then the next winter season rolled around again and a bunch of co-workers were complaining about how they couldn't call the snow closing hotline from their Google Voice enabled phones. Someone who worked with the people who had implemented the system went to ask how it worked and discovered it used a ring-back tone to play the message. At this point I realized why Twilio always thought the call failed since you can't start scripting a call in Twilio until it is actually answered.
I live in Indonesia and I can vouch that ring-back-tones are not just alive but also remain very profitable.<p>When you call a person with a RBT there is first a message saying "If you want this tone for 10cents please press 7", then the music starts, usually the latest chart-song.<p>Needless to say it has a solid customer base made up mostly of teens, but also of corporates with a company jingo as the RBT (I kid you not).<p>Im not sure if the big chat apps (will dominate VoiP) have this function built in yet but Id imagine they will at some stage, a nice VAS if you can charge for it..
The U.S. market for straight ringback tones was really hampered by lack of competent marketing, poor (and as josh2600 said: annoyingly over-complicated, Telecom-mentality driven) implementation, and a complete lack of inter-carrier cooperation in the VAS space. Too bad - like Indonesia, it's quite huge in Latin America and many other parts of the world.<p>Ring Plus is still working with that technology - but now does a lot with <i>reverse</i> ringback tones; rbts based on what you want/prefer to hear, not what the person you're calling wants you to hear. It's now a mobile phone MVNO in the U.S using reverse RBTs to deliver a Spotify/Rdio/Pandora-style radio feed that goes towards subsidizing or eliminating your phone bill.
This was huge in New Zealand for a while in the mid 2000s - I have no idea how you'd sign up for it nowadays, but sometimes I'll call somebody and still hear a tinny rendition of I Believe In A Thing Called Love before they pick up.