Why is it that sometimes when I dial a number from my cell (Verizon Wireless) that many other people are also trying to call (like American Idol etc) that I will hear a few “rings” and then a message saying it’s unable to make the call?
Is the ring kind of like a holding zone while it attempts to connect?
I haven’t experienced this but may be able to shed a small amount of light. I used to work in cell phone billing, but not the actual network, so I’m not an expert.
When you dial your cell phone, the cell infrastructure routes your call to a switch, which is a big computer that completes the routing of your call. The switch generates a tone that you hear as ringing when it completes the call. By the time you hear the ringing, the switch should know that it has completed a circuit to the other phone and it’s ringing there.
So why might the switch generate the ring tone if it doesn’t really have a complete circuit? I’m not sure, but in the situation you describe there are probably lots of lines on that one phone number, and you have lots of calls coming in. So there is probably some timing issue (like what computer geeks call a race condition) where the switch thinks it got the circuit, but some other switch really got it, due to all the jostling for the many attempting switches to get one of the many possible lines. So the switch handling your call has to backpedal, or maybe even the destination switch realizes it can’t really complete the call and generates the “too busy right now” message.
This is an educated guess. Maybe there’s a real phone person out there who will read this.