Rural America Still Waiting for Phone Calls That Won’t Connect

Some residents and businesses in rural America face a perplexing problem: They know people are trying to call their phones and sometimes failing, but they don’t know why. Landline customers have logged hundreds of complaints with the Federal Communications Commission in recent years about calls that don’t reach them. When a call is dropped, the caller hears a phone ringing endlessly or gets dead air. Telecom experts say the failed calls are most often bound for landlines served by small rural phone companies, though the calls’ origin can be a cellphone, office line or automated system. Efforts by the FCC and lawmakers in Washington, DC, to address the problem have focused on low-cost carriers that route calls through the internet. Big telephone companies like Verizon often use the cheapest available middleman to get long-distance calls to numbers in a local exchange. Critics say some calls are dropped by the middlemen carriers to avoid connection fees that local phone companies charge for accessing numbers in their network, though proving that is difficult. The fees are higher in less-densely populated rural areas than in urban centers.