Caller Tones is a new service from Telstra offering personalised ringback tones to Telstra Mobile customers.

“Ringback tone”?

“Ringback tone” is a label still unfamiliar to people who comfortably use telephone-industry terms such as “dial tone” “engaged tone” and “ring tone” every day. To cut a long story short, the ringback tone is the tone heard by the caller while the destination phone is ringing.

Unlike the ring tone, which is generated by the handset that is being called, the ringback tone is generated by the network switch responsible for routing the call. Ringback tone characteristics vary from country to country; if you have ever called overseas and thought “that sounds different from what I’m used to” while you’re waiting for the call to be answered, it’s because you are hearing an unfamiliar ringback tone generated by the foreign phone company’s network hardware.

While the personalisation of a phone ring tone is a trivial task–some of us change our ring tones like we change our socks!–the personalisation of a phone ringback tone can only be performed by the phone company operating the network. The ringback tone is thus a form of mobile content controlled by the phone company rather than by the person carrying the phone.

Telstra now offers a personalised ringback tone service–Caller Tones–to Telstra Mobile customers. Telstra Mobile customers now have the ability to play something other than the default network ringback tone to the people calling them. The personalised ringback tones, or “caller tones”, range from music, to sound effects, to comedy voiceovers and impersonations. Caller Tones customers can select different caller tones to play to different people, on different days of the week, or during different hours of the day.

Caller tones appeal to mobile content providers for a number of reasons. Since caller tones are a feature of the network rather than of the handset, they cannot be copied from one phone to another. Perhaps most importantly, caller tones represent a much broader-visibility form of promotional content than ring tones; a ring tone is heard only by the call recipient or the people in his immediate vicinity, while a caller tone is heard by every single person who calls that phone.

To learn more about Caller Tones, and to browse the selection of caller tones presently available, visit http://ctones.telstra.com

Caller Tones is managed for Telstra by m.Net Corporation: http://www.mnetcorporation.com