T-Mobile has agreed to pay (PDF) the FCC $40 million for not fixing ongoing call failures that rural customers have experienced. The company previously claimed that it had solved the issues, but the Commission were consistently getting complaints about calls that were not going through.
The wireless carrier also admitted that it had committed another sin: Injecting false ring tones while customers are on the line, which basically misleads customers into thinking that T-Mobile isn’t the one to blame if calls fail.
In the agreement, T-Mobile admitted the fault and must pay a fine. It’s also worth mentioning that this isn’t the first time the company has paid a fine. In 2015, for example, the carrier settled with the FCC for $17.5 million around a pair of 911 outages, preventing customers from contacting emergency services. In another case, the carrier paid $48 million in 2016 over misleading data plans, which throttled users that consumed the most information without properly disclosing the policy.
