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I'll repeat what was explained to me, but make no promises or guarantees about the accuracy of what I'm writing;
This is an inherent glitch in cellular tower programming, mostly reported on CDMA and TDMA phones. It's caused when multiple towers try to pick up your signal at the same time, then each one thinks it's handling less calls at the time and asks for control of the call from the other presumably more busy tower. These signals are sent simultaneously, and both towers think that the other is about to transfer control of the call, and both wait for confirmation of this. When a tower takes control of a call, it waits for the other to send a confirmation, but until that point, it will forward audio to the other tower, and forward signals from the other tower to your phone. You end up with two towers that asked to take over control of the call simultaneously waiting for a confirmation from the other tower, bouncing your voice around in limbo until you decide that waiting on the line for any longer is counterproductive and hang up, at which point both towers, were they human, would think, "Look what you did now, you slow bastard, he gave up because of you." (the lack of emotion and sarcasm required for this kind of thought is why computers are much more suited to cellular transmission management than humans.) Each tower sends a notice to the other that it has disconnected the call, and the slot is freed up for another customer (if these were humans, before going on to another customer, the towers would shout at each other, "I already know that, shithead.")
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