UKH

Bear with me here but I'm wondering if this has happened to anyone else...

I was talking to my dad on the phone last night. He's sitting out the lockdown at my sister's place in Spain, so this was an international call: my UK landline to his Spanish mobile.

After a few minutes of conversation the line went dead, but then appeared to reconnect so we carried on talking. Only it quicky became apparent he'd started talking about the same things we'd already discussed. This was a little annoying, but he's elderly and sometimes forgets, and there isn't exactly a lot to talk about the the moment. So I went over it again. But then I started to realise that he couldn't hear what I was saying: none of his responses made much sense in the context of what I'd said this time around. Just as I started to suspect his hearing aid had stopped working, the line went dead and came back and I could hear him saying the same things again.

At this point it finally dawned on me that I was hearing a recording of his side of the converation. I listened for a couple of minutes without saying anything and he said exactly the same things again with the same pauses and ums and errs. When I was sure of what I was hearing, I hung up and phoned him back. I estimate that about four minutes had passed from the initial disconnection to me actually speaking to him again, so the length of the "recording" was maybe a couple of minutes. He confirmed that from his point of view, the call went dead and I phoned him back "four or five" minutes later.

I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced the same thing on a phone call?

I apologise for the drawn-out description, but this was a surprisingly unsettling experience - probably because of how long it took me to realise what was going on and how easily I was fooled when talking one-to-one with someone I've know for fifty years.

I don't believe that MI5 or Bill Gates is tapping my phone. I do believe that it was some kind of technical malfunction. It just doesn't match my mental model of how phones work, and how they fail. After thinking about it, I suspect that Vigin Media stuff my landline into a VOIP connection to Spain where it's injected back into the Spanish mobile network, and the recoding was some kind of audio-buffering-gone-mad and/or software error in the internet link. But thats just a guess.

Anyone else had this? Or know what happened?

Ghosts in the machine brah.

Has your dad had a covid jab and was either of you close to a 5G mast?

No and no!

In my younger years I had a similar experience, but it was an in person conversation that appeared on my mobile's answerphone about 2 minutes after I left the house.  Somebody in the room where we were sat must have dialled my from their pocket.  For reasons best not shared on a public forum, my mind may not have been processing information in it's normal way, I was left thoroughly discombobulated by the experience.

With your dad, is it possible that he tried calling you back when the line went dead, but got through to the answerphone without realising?

Any black helicopters hovering about at the time?

He did try phoning me back but he said he got an engaged tone. I was phoning from a dumb cordless landline so he couldn't leave a message even if he'd wanted to - which he almost never does.

And it was an exact replay of what he'd said. Not a message he'd left.

Broadcasting mind control rays to the nanoparticles in my brain? Time I made a new tin foil hat methinks...

Generally with VOIP, you use UDP. If you drop a packet or two, it doesn't ask for a re-transmission, as TCP would. We can deal with a conversation with drop outs. Re-transmitting dropped packets, talk like yoda you would. However, the VOIP channels (if it is using VOIP) may be encapsulated in a TCP tunnel, that does re-transmission and, or, is buffered, possibly at multiple locations on the journey.

You'd also have quality of service on the VOIP channel. This would prioritize your real time activities (voice, tv), over, say, downloading a web page. Lots of moving parts are involved in the end to end connection. It only take one to be a bit wacky for all sorts of fun and games.

I once had an awkward conversation with a cunningly constructed answerphone message. It went something along the lines of:

"hello<pause>pardon<pause>hello<longer pause>can you speak up<pause> did you say Tuesday<pause>etc"

Yeah I understand what you mean. And a couple of minutes is way, way outside what I'd expect for even TCP buffering, never mind UDP. Which is partly why I'm still struggling to fit the experience into my mental model of how this stuff works. Why would a real-time voice link keep such a long audio recording?

I'm sure it wasn't a psychnological effect. I was totally sober and had just been doing the washing up. I remember watching the movement of the second hand on the kitchen clock because I wondered if I was having some weird flashback.

Speculating here...

The application may know to drop packets. But if you trunk 1000's of VOIP calls into a tcp tunnel, the tunnel isn't aware of whats in the tunnel. It could be that there was a blip on a tunneled connection, and that was buffered. Big connections, big buffers. The application then received a bunch of UDP packets, which is fire and forget, and just squirts it down the line.

As well as IP connections, the connection may break out into SS7, the telephone protocol. This is in order to make the hop to the mobile device. The more you drill down, the more moving parts you'll find. Each can go wrong, in exciting and exotic ways.

I've had similar happen but on a shorter timescale and soon resolved, all so briefly sorted that I didn't worry about it much. I am not surprised that you were so discombobulated by the experience you describe! Sounds like you have enough of an idea of what might have happened though. I have no idea. 

I guess part of the weirdness might have been the sense your Dad was losing the plot? I think I'd have found it strange as well. I once had a lady who sounded exactly like my Grandma ringing up soon after she'd died asking for my Mum, and after a couple of questions it turned out to be her sister, my mind briefly went to 'WTF?' before it became clear what was going on.

Yeah. I think that was a large part of it.

(Just to be clear though: he's not "losing it" and is pretty sharp.)

That would freak me out.  I'm glad there is an explanation.

The same with mine at age 76 which is nice. Interestingly, he has an uncommonly large head, which has a loose correlation with being less likely to get dementia (iirc it's dementia, but it could be another degenerative condition). He compares well with my sis in law's parents, to do with bounce. 

My own head is medium sized, so I'm crossing my fingers for a cure by the time I'm somewhere around that age (when I think about it).

I think there is a naughty network somewhere in the chain engaging in arbitrage. 

Imaginary scenario - You called your Dad's mobile in Spain from your mobile.  Your network (GiffGaff) would charge you 10p/minute, keep 3p of that and pay their carrier network (Three) 7p to get the call into Europe, who would keep 1p and in turn would pay another carrier (Telefonica) 6p to get it across Spain who would keep 1p and pay your Dad's network (Movistar) 5p to connect the call to your Dad.

 Telefonica have killed the downstream leg of the original call (Telefonica-> Movistar) to reduce its costs but kept the upstream (Three->Telefonica) going for another minute with recorded speech. They receive 6p for that minute but don't pay Movistar 5p, and thus make 6p instead of 1p. 

Of course, any network in the chain could have done the dirty. Whoever made the call should report it to the calling network operator (who will need details of calling number, called number, and time of call), if no-one reports it the victim network operators might not pick it up easily - because each network only has visibility of the legs in/out of their network they cannot see that the downstream leg has been disconnected and thus are oblivious.

Dealing with this kind of thing is my day job. I've no direct experience of this exact 'problem', but its a likely scenario.  Speech doesn't don't get recorded and replayed like this under fault conditions. Thanks for the good description of the problem, I'll look out for it.

Quite a few reports of this happening, particularly with international calls:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/gjp66u/strange_thing_my_internati...
• https://commsrisk.com/call-replay-spying-or-fraud/
• https://www.jpost.com/jpost-tech/mystery-disconnects-and-loop-recordings-pl...
• https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/131590/phone-conversations-bei...

A lot of the phishing/advertising junk does that.

Clearly a glitch in the Matrix, nothing to worry about.

I had a really weird phone call experience a few years ago

I was sitting in China. I picked up the phone to call someone and heard my brother (in the UK) say "Hello?" My phone had not rung at all. By coincidence I had picked up the phone at the precise second he got through to me. From his perspective he dialled..... and then suddenly heard me speak

He used to phone me about once every few weeks, never at the same time of day

Weird or what?

Intriguing theory. But why would they record and play back my call to keep the call apparently open? Why not just play random noises or the same voice track for all calls?

Never had that, but I remember back before digital exchanges (i think) getting crossed lines where you and the person you were talking to could faintly hear another random conversation on a different line, but they seemingly couldn't hear you

Sounds weird. Hopefully you're not involved in some sort of number station...

Anyone wanting to creep yourself out listen to the recordings from this little Russian number:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76 

Because you'd realise something was wrong if you heard random noises or a different voice track and clear down faster, curiosity will keep you listening to your own recording.

Perhaps some random glitch turned on the message recording and then played it back. There's maybe a maximum duration for recordings so it played back repeatedly.

This is really interesting, just got my wife to read your OP and she had an almost identical experience with an international phone call to her elderly dad a few weeks ago.  She was worrying that he’d just had the same conversation with her twice without noticing, so you’ve made her feel much better, thank you.  Now we will assume it’s just MI5 monitoring our calls

I wish I could say the same!

Ah yes. Of course!

I’d tell you a joke about UDP, but you might not get it.

On the internet, data is sent in chunks called packets. If a TCP packet gets lost in transit then it is automatically re-sent, and they're guaranteed to arrive in the same order as they were sent. But this comes at the cost of slower transmission time and increased network usage. UDP packets are fire and forget - if they don't arrive then theres no easy way to know to re-send, but they're lighter-weight and therefore faster and tend to be used for streaming.

Thanks you.  Leaving aside TCP being trichlorophenylmethyliodosalicyl, particularly pungent antiseptic from my childhood, I think I did understand all that! 

That deserves a handshake, but well, you know....