Random dialing beep while on phone call??

[buffee]

Been over a year. Beeping NEVER came back!

 

[Judy B1]

I am also experiencing beeping sounds like someone pressing keys on the phone while I'm taking to another person. The other person can't hear it but I certainly can. I have a Note 5 from TMobile. I have complained about this for at least 2 years to TMobile and no one seems to be able to help me. I'm concerned someone is tapping my phone but I'm not sure. Can anyone help?

 

[vee_2345612]

Hi Judy and others....

I'm in the SAME boat. This beeping tone which sounds exactly like someone pressing a button has been happening on my line for nearly two years as well. I actually switched providers when I moved to another place because I couldn't carry my number over and ironically enough the problem still persisted.

This tells me it is not phone or device specific, or even carrier specific. When you call in and ask the provider to look into it and find a way to stop it they seem to have no idea what it is or how to stop it.

Research tells me that it might be something called "DTMF TALK OFF" its a widely reported issue. But like Judy, I also am thinking what if some weirdo is out there tapping into my conversations with my friends and family?

Is this noise indicative of someone tapping into your phone? I feel like in this day and age technology is so advanced that if someone was listening in to your calls you wouldn't hear them and know it. I could be just jumping to conclusions, but what else is one left to think?

Has anyone in this thread who reported the issue PREVIOUSLY found a fix? Or noticed that it eventually later went away?

If so let us know what we can do to fix this highly annoying issue. Thanks in advance!!

 

[natehoy]

Research tells me that it might be something called "DTMF TALK OFF" its a widely reported issue. But like Judy, I also am thinking what if some weirdo is out there tapping into my conversations with my friends and family?

Yes, this is it exactly.

The sounds that your phone used to make over the old analog lines were called "DUAL TONE MULTIPLE FREQUENCY" sounds. They were made to be a very specific multi-tone harmonic that dialing equipment could recognize. Before that, they used "pulse" dialing on rotary phones.

DTMF sounds are still in use today for things like menus ("Press 1 to be left on hold, press 2 to be left on hold longer, press 0 to be placed on hold immediately") and the like. The problem is, compressed digital protocols do not render these sounds well enough to be recognized by the remote equipment. Modern phone companies are well aware of this and if they recognize what sounds like a DTMF tone, they will filter it out with software and replace it with a higher-fidelity version of the same DTMF tone in the hopes that the receiving equipment will be able to understand it.

Unfortunately, some people just have "those voices" - my mother is one of them - that occasionally manage to inadvertently mimic a DTMF tone well enough that the phone company tries to reproduce it. It was horrible on Vonage until I managed to convince them to allow me access to the advanced settings of my VoIP adapter, and once I got access to that I was able to turn DTMF detection off - which means any equipment on my premises that depended on DTMF was useless, but I never had any such equipment. Once I went back to a cell line, the problem started right back up.

It has not happened since my mother's land line was upgraded by her local telco to a digital one, probably because the sound artifacts were no longer present to trigger DTMF detection on my end.

You can try asking your carrier to turn off that feature on your line. You may or may not be able to, and it may or may not help since the tones can also be recognized by the carrier of the person you are talking to and "boosted" across to your end.

 

[natehoy]

Re: I have metro PC's and hear the same beep while on phone call.

A side note, I can say I am hearing the noise more consistently when I speak to women than men.

Given the average tone of female vs. male voices, that makes sense. DTMF are generally all higher frequencies closer to the average female voice than the average male voice.

My mother's voice triggers a DTMF every few minutes. I haven't tried calling AT&T to see if they can tune the setting per line. When I was on Vonage, talking with my mother was extremely frustrating because her voice would trigger multiple tones a minute, but this was when they used more off-the-shelf VoIP adapters so I was able to hack into the router's hidden settings and turn off DTMF detection (just needed to remember to turn it back on when I needed to call in a prescription or something - LOL).