Have anybody thought why you hear the sound(beeeep-beeeeep-....) when you make a call and from where it comes? Yes, telco can put anything there. Even more, I wounder why we do not hear some commercial Ad's every time we call. This would be in a spirit of current times...
Indeed! Verizon, a carrier in the US, actually made a product out of this by allowing people to buy what they branded "Ringback Tones" which would play some song or tune when someone called your number and you hadn't picked up yet. Not sure if it's still a thing.
They are. All those Emergency numbers you call to see if school is canceled are really ringback tones. It's how many people can call at once to receive the message w/o hearing a busy tone.
Well, of course if you are willing to pay the phone company for multiple lines and install an expensive phone system you can waste a tone of money doing it other ways.
They were pushed heavily by operators in (parts of?) Europe in the mid 2000's, back when every other TV ad was for Jamba ringtones. I was on the operator "Three" and they let you set your ringback tone to "3 Is A Magic Number" for free much to the chagrin of absolutely everyone who called me.
Same thing in India, though I was there a while ago. People seemed to love setting it to the some song from a recent movie. It was about a dollar a month, decent income for the telcos, I'd imagine.
Some of the mobile carriers in the U.K. have provided the option to change the dialing tone when people call you for a good few years. I think it was limited to a preselected list of songs though.
In Denmark, we have "THREE IS THE MAGIC NUMBER... YES IT IS. IT'S THE MAGIC NUMBER. []" "song" when dialling others while using the 3 Mobile telco operator.
