# Is it normal for U-Verse VoIP not to hang up unless BOTH parties do? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 13, 2015, 5:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-normal-for-u-verse-voip-not-to-hang-up-unless-both-parties-do/712590 "2015-02-13T17:30:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2015, 5:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-normal-for-u-verse-voip-not-to-hang-up-unless-both-parties-do/712590/1 "2015-02-13T17:30:46Z")
This is bugging me. I have a nice conversation with somebody. Hang up. Phone immediately rings and I pick up. That person is still on my line? They hadn’t hung up yet. I’m really worried about telemarketers and pollers hijacking my line. If they don’t hang up am I screwed? Is this normal? We’re considering going back to a real phone line. Even paying more because of this issue with VoIP. ---
**Author:** ![kayaker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kayaker/32/441_2.png) [@kayaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayaker)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2015, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-normal-for-u-verse-voip-not-to-hang-up-unless-both-parties-do/712590/2 "2015-02-13T17:55:43Z")
When I was a kid (the 60s) we used to prank call people, then leave the phone off the hook just to tie up their phone. We also would send mail to each other without a stamp by putting the intended recipient as the return address. We were scamps! ---
**Author:** ![aktep](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f0a364/32.png) [@aktep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aktep)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2015, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-normal-for-u-verse-voip-not-to-hang-up-unless-both-parties-do/712590/3 "2015-02-13T21:45:40Z")
When I had Uverse VoIP, that was not behavior I experienced. ---
**Author:** ![Cabin\_Fever\_1](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cabin_fever_1/32/2908_2.png) [@Cabin\_Fever\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cabin_Fever_1)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2015, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-normal-for-u-verse-voip-not-to-hang-up-unless-both-parties-do/712590/4 "2015-02-13T23:10:30Z")
> [@aceplace57](#): > > This is bugging me. I have a nice conversation with somebody. Hang up. Phone immediately rings and I pick up. That person is still on my line? They hadn’t hung up yet. > > I’m really worried about telemarketers and pollers hijacking my line. If they don’t hang up am I screwed? > > Is this normal? We’re considering going back to a real phone line. Even paying more because of this issue with VoIP. I have never had this experience with them. You may need to provide more info on your setup to us. Sorry to say, but you may have to find an intelligent tech through them to figure out what is going on. Lots of variables here. ---
**Author:** ![gotpasswords](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c57346/32.png) [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2015, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-normal-for-u-verse-voip-not-to-hang-up-unless-both-parties-do/712590/5 "2015-02-14T00:08:44Z")
This predates VOIP and Uverse by decades. Some robo-calls in the 80s were somehow able to sieze your line and hold it hostage for a while even if you hang up on them. Also, the older electromechanical switching systems could get stuck, leaving your line in never-neverland. ---
**Author:** ![Alley\_Dweller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alley_dweller/32/430_2.png) [@Alley\_Dweller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alley_Dweller)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2015, 12:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-normal-for-u-verse-voip-not-to-hang-up-unless-both-parties-do/712590/6 "2015-02-14T00:44:44Z")
Does Uverse Voip work like a regular land line phone? Did you by any chance first depress the switchhook on your phone to end the call, then let go and then hang up the receiver? When you depress the switchhook briefly, that puts the call on hold. You get another dial tone allowing you to make a three-way call when you let go of the switchhook. If you do that without reconnecting the first party you were talking to, when you eventually hang up (whether or not you placed a second call), if the first party is still there, it will ring and reconnect you. The same is true of any landline phone service that has three-way calling enabled. ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2015, 4:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-normal-for-u-verse-voip-not-to-hang-up-unless-both-parties-do/712590/7 "2015-02-14T04:19:05Z")
> [@aceplace57](#): > > This is bugging me. I have a nice conversation with somebody. Hang up. Phone immediately rings and I pick up. That person is still on my line? They hadn’t hung up yet. I got U-Verse installed last August. (And don’t get me started, at least not in this thread, about what a clusterfucked comedy of errors that was.) I had exactly this happen several times during the first month or two, but not at all consistently. Only a few times. Since then it has never happened again. Two relevant details in my experience (and **aceplace57** ’s also?) are: [ol][li] These were not incoming calls. They were outgoing calls that I had initiated.[/li][li] I was listening to an automated robo-report of my banking account status, which goes on and on, but then I hung up when I had heard what I needed to know. My phone immediate rang, and when I picked up, my robo-banker was still there talking to me.[/ol][/li]It was known, back in the day, that a phone call would be disconnected when the _caller_ hung up, but not when the _callee_ hung up (or at least, not for a while). I think this was the hostage-taking situation that **gotpasswords** is referring to, a few posts above. Note that this my situation was different: I was the _caller,_ and hanging up did not exactly terminate the call. And note that the call was not only not terminated (weird enough), but my own phone immediately rang, just as **aceplace57** says happened to him. This is curiouser and curiouser. And it only happened a few times, then I haven’t had it happen again. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2015, 2:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-normal-for-u-verse-voip-not-to-hang-up-unless-both-parties-do/712590/8 "2015-02-14T14:47:14Z")
> [@Senegoid](#): > > … It was known, back in the day, that a phone call would be disconnected when the _caller_ hung up, but not when the _callee_ hung up (or at least, not for a while). … This was typical phone system behavior up through the mid 1960s. After that a federal mandate came out to terminate the connection when either party hung up. It took until the mid 1970s for all the equipment nationwide to be upgraded. Since then all US systems, including VOIP, are designed to terminate the link when either party disconnects. Occasionally that doesn’t happen for some glitchy reason. This is termed “failure of supervision.” For some deep-seated technological reasons VOIP is more prone to this than is/was traditional landline POTS. A huge difference nowadays is that phones are computers in their own right, not just dumb passive devices. And like any other consumer computer software, the stuff is whipped out as quickly and as sloppily as they can get away with. If there is any quality at all, it’s in the backbones and servers. Which are involved in setting up VOIP calls, but then drop out once the two crappily-written software-based phones are talking directly to one another. Even if you have a physical VOIP instrument, rather than just an app on your PC, everything that matters about it is still just software. \*\*Alley Dweller \*\*hit on a very common and very different cause of this problem: users misusing the phone’s “UI” by hanging up wrongly. ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2015, 3:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-normal-for-u-verse-voip-not-to-hang-up-unless-both-parties-do/712590/9 "2015-02-14T15:21:50Z")
Senegoid sums it up nicely. It happens occasionally and I think only when I initiated the call. Its just so strange that VoIP calls back immediately after I hang up. The other issue is dialing a number and it rings and rings. I never hear them pick up. But, then my mom will call back and say that she answered. I never heard her voice. Or, sometimes mom will call and she says I picked up before it even rang. She has VoIP with a company called Suddenlink. We both use real landline phones that got switched to VoIP.