Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

WebTone, DialTone, FooTone, What?

Dan cites it, Scott coined it, but I have to admit to mentally cringing every time I hear someone inside Sun talk about FooTone, ThisTone, ThatTone…

It took me ages to work out what the hell was behind the terminology.

It seems almost that there is some sort of mythos about telephone “dialtone” in the USA – that is it something warm and welcoming, an “enabler”, almost of the social fabric stature of a cup of tea in Britain.

The thing is: over here in the UK, dialtone used to start at 1p a minute for local calls, and went upwards from there. This generation grew up with no local-rate freebies, but instead with an army of bolshevik grey-overall-suited engineers fixing things when they went wrong. Deregulation has helped somewhat, but we’ve always viewed the phone as a utility (ha! the irony!) and utilities are something you pay money for, which (like any other paid-for service) tends to remove the romantic, warm-fuzzy aspect.

I can’t speak for the rest of Europe – as to whether we’re all equally confused by the terminology – but if you want to know what *Tone sounds like to foreign ears, substitute the word “Vroooom”.

SunVrooom. WebVrooom. NetVrooom.

Does this sound enticing to you? Or faintly silly[1]? As with “Tone”, there is a vague notion of what you’re getting at, but the value proposition is rather diluted, as is the clarity of the messaging.

Do please consult your G11N staffers, people…
—
[1] Irrespective of the Mazda “Vroom Vroom” ad-campaign, which likewise suffered, but at least was semi-apt…

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Comments

3 responses to “WebTone, DialTone, FooTone, What?”

  1. Katz
    The big freaking webtone switch…

    This is another “Americanism.”

    … The telephone in the States is still a utility, but there was always just a base fee for local calling, and anything above that was priced at a per-minute model. But what Scott was trying to turn into an analogy is that every time someone picks up the phone [ with near 0 exceptions ] there is a dialtone. He wanted to do that to “the web” … it would always be “on, there and available.” I don’t think he was shooting for an “enabler” kind of idea from it, he just wanted to push boxes and services that would give a ubiquitous kind of availability of apps and info.

    It does take a little bit of a leap, but for us drones here (or when I was a SUNW drone in the States) it was pretty easy to grok.

    Reply
  2. alecm
    re: The big freaking webtone switch…

    Over here – until the rise of the cellphone – there was still lack of faith in it. You might say that you’ve “got *a* dialtone”, not with any certainty that it’d work.

    Never that you’ve “got dialtone”.

    The indefinite article speaks volumes about how (some) non-Americans view the service.

    Reply
  3. Dave Walker
    re: WebTone, DialTone, FooTone, What?

    I’d have thought that “Vroom” would usually involve performance connotations (although having an engine fire up the first time it turns over does suggest reliability, agreed).

    As already hinted, getting a dialtone isn’t actually much of an indicator of service quality – if you have a path through to your nearest [PABX|MSC] and it’s correctly set up you’ll get a dialtone, pretty much no matter what’s happening in the wider Class 5 infrastructure. Also, if the bandwidth of the lines from your nearest Class 5 to the intended call destination is exhausted, back in the old days of simple, wired ‘phones you’d just get an engaged tone rather than something indicating what was really happening…

    Reply

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