Report: No ringing on my end when placing outbound calls, but the call goes through

Hardware Librem 5
24

I think that after today’s updates this problem is fixed for me🤞

25

Well, not for me. I haven’t heard a ring on the other side for any calls over the last week or so.
You can’t expect people to make calls this way.

26

same issue with AweSIM, with no ringing when placing calls using the T-Mobile network. You just wait and someone picks up, might be great to create a fake ringing tone on the client side as a workaround, and just cancel it once connection is established?

I think the ringing tone is really just an indicator that call has been placed and waiting to be established by the recipient picking up. Start ringing when outbound call is made, stop ringing when call is established, the below would be an example of a stop signal - stop ringing when ‘MO CONNECTED’, that all seems to be manageable with AT modem commands, independent of what the network operator is doing? VoLTE wouldn’t it send equivalent signals to GSM that a modem can understand?:

AT+CLCC=1
AT+MORING=<mode>
<mode> 0 - Not show call state of mobile originated call 1 - Show call state of mobile originated call. After the call number is dialed, the URC strings of MO RING will be sent if another call is alerted and the URC strings of MO CONNECTED will be sent if the call is established.

`AT+MORING=1`

will enable a family of URCs in case of Mobile Originated call, in the form MO RING - the call is alerted.
MO CONNECTED - the call is established

depending on modem, the above is a SIM900 GSM module.

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27

I’ve noticed when I call a land line, I hear the ringing like it’s supposed to do.

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28

If only I still had landlines left to call… :slight_smile:

29

Thats old school!

30

It’s my parents. They’re in there 80’s

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31

I’m having this issue as well. AweSIM, T-Mobile under the hood. I never hear a ring when placing calls to others, and occasionally they’ll drop with no feedback.

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32

Update to this - I do get ringing on my end when using the headphone jack! So I suspect it is happening all the time, it’s just not routing to the external speakers ever.

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33

@NyxTheNightHerself
Your comment got me curious, and I tried the same thing myself (AT&T/US Cellular MVNO, using USC for this test).

Plugged in some headphones, and for the first time ever (I’ve had it more than a year) got an outgoing ring indicator! I thought it was an issue with the modem not having any ring indicator all this time, but it seems it’s some kind of issue with just not routing the audio properly. Maybe I’ll try digging into this further and see if I can come up with a fix if somebody else doesn’t beat me to it…

Edit: Built wys 0.1.12 from git, and it works fine. Strangely, I can’t find anything in the changes that would explain what fixed it. Also, the commit history says 0.1.12 was released over a month ago, but apt says 0.1.11 is the latest. Whatever… fix for me is to build the latest from git and replace the executable.

Edit 2: spoke too soon about it being “fixed”. It works for landlines, but not mobile. At least it works some of the time now.

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34

I’m lost… What did you build from git?

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35

Oops, thought I already mentioned it.
‘Wys’

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36

It has always worked for landlines. And for some mobile numbers too (depending on the other sides provider, maybe).

Anyhow, it is on of the most annoying features of the L5 - and it has been for a long time.

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37

I did some testing this morning:

  • calling another Telecom mobile number +49 170 45xxxxx (the mobile was sitting on my desk) gives no audible feedback of the call in my L5 while the destination was ringing
  • calling my landline at home +49 89 436xxxxx gives no audible feedback of the call in my L5 while the destination was ringing
  • calling my office over a landline number in Munich +49 89 2488xxxxx, which ends up somehow in Microsoft Teams on my laptop, yes gives audible feedback, while Teams was “ringing” in my laptop,

What does this mean?

Call-progress tone - Wikipedia says:

"In telephony, call progress tones are audible tones that provide an indication of the status of a telephone call to the user. The tones are generated by a central office or a private branch exchange (PBX) to the calling party.

Telecommunication equipment such as fax machines and modems are designed to recognize certain tones, such as dial tone and busy tone.

The ITU-T E.180 and E.182 recommendations define the technical characteristics and intended usage of some of these tones. ToneScript is a tone description format that may be used to specify the tone. Many European systems follow the recommendations of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). …"

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38

Did anyone ever find an answer to this? I’m having the same issue, it doesn’t prevent me from making calls but it is annoying as I can never be sure that the call is going through until I get an answer.

A search shows that the same issue has come up with Android, iOS, and /e/os at different times. Always on VoLTE. Apparently there are cases when the phone itself needs to generate the ringback tone, so maybe that just isn’t implemented yet in PureOS? (May also be some kind of call/audio routing issue, discussions on this present a number of different explanations.)

39

I’m also sometimes missing the ringing tone (tone signaling the originator of a telephone call while the destination terminal is alerting the receiving party).

I’m using PureOS Crimson. I could not figure out what could be the cause of this. For example today, I did not get the ringing tone for any outgoing call. But for many days before I did get the ringing tone.

Should we file an issue for this?

What would be good additional information to try to discover the root cause of this issue?

When you know that the ringing tone sometimes is missing, this issue is not major, but if you do not know about this issue it can seem that the phone is not working. So for new users I would consider this as a major issue.

40

The network. It’s not a mystery :wink:

The root cause is that most networks generate the ringing tone by themselves and send it as audio - this in fact used to be the only option available. With IMS, however, the network has a choice and can offload this to ME. Apparently BM818 does not implement that though, and we don’t know yet how to make it tell us that it’s needed so the OS could generate it by itself. And once we will know, we’ll have to put all the plumbing in there to let ModemManager expose that information, as it doesn’t exist right now.

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41

Thanks.
I had to look up the abbreviations. For others not knowledgable in this area:
IMS: IP Multimedia Subsystem
ME: Mobile Equipment
For findability I also reported this as an issue in GitLab.

Edit: corrected.

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42

ME is Mobile Equipment (aka your phone). IMS is the tech behind VoLTE/VoNR/VoWiFi.

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43

This happen on some Telephony carrier, most incompatibilities on MM, Gnu Dawn may fix it.

Retest:
Down to 2G and make same calls number, so on 2G will ringing…
Up to 4G but different telephony carrier number to call, it will ringing.

Note:
Gnu Dawn, it is NOT Mobian, Postmarket Rolling…dont confuse.