Missed call

A missed call is a telephone call that is deliberately terminated by the caller before being answered by its intended recipient, in order to communicate a pre-agreed message. It is a form of one-bit messaging.

Missed calls were common in emerging markets where mobile phones with limited outgoing calls were widely used; as the call is not actually completed and connected, it does not carry a cost to the caller, hence they can conserve their remaining prepaid credit. Specific patterns of consecutive missed calls have been developed in some countries to denote specific messages. Missed calls are also referred to in some parts of Africa as beeping, flashing in Nigeria, a flashcall in Pakistan, miskol in the Philippines and Indonesia, and ring-cut in Sri Lanka.

Missed calls were especially prominent in India when mobile broadband and smartphones were not yet ubiquitous: expanding upon their use as a communications method, they were adopted as a form of marketing communications, in which users can "missed call" specific numbers and receive a call or text back that contains advertising and other content. Other forms of services were also built around the use of missed calls. By the mid-2010s, missed calling began to decline in popularity as access to low-cost smartphones and mobile data plans proliferated.