ATIS, NECA Partner on Rural Call Completion Testing

ATIS, a telecom industry association representing manufacturers and service providers, said it will partner with the National Exchange Carrier Association on a voluntary testing project aimed at identifying call completion issues.

The project, to be known as the Joint National Call Testing Project, is “designed to provide an opportunity for an originating service provider . . . to identify any call failures and for carriers on both ends of the call to troubleshoot shortly thereafter.” Calls not going through to rural areas has been an important issue for service providers serving those areas, who believe certain long-distance carriers or least-cost routers who handle calls for the long-distance carriers are deliberately failing to complete calls to rural areas as a means of avoiding the payment of per-minute access charges to the rural carriers serving the called parties. Those access charges tend to be higher in rural areas to help cover the costs of delivering service to those areas. When calls do not go through to rural areas, rural carriers say their customers put their businesses and even their lives at risk.