Amid talk of broadband, S.D. senator says rural landline calls are still getting dropped

Sen. Tim Johnson

While the Federal Communications Commission held its Rural Broadband Workshop this week to look at ways to improve broadband access in rural America, Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) said some rural residents across the country are still dealing with a problem that should have been fixed years ago: completing a basic landline call, Peter Harriman reports for the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. Johnson told reporters, “We should be worrying about narrowing the digital divide, not worrying about rural communities receiving basic telephone service.”

Johnson said "Long distance and wireless carriers trying to cut costs in rural areas by contracting with cut-rate routers have created a pervasive pattern of poor phone service in rural states," Harriman writes. "Calls are not completed, and callers receive incorrect messages that numbers have been disconnected."

The FCC "tried to address the issue with rule changes from 2011 to 2013," Harriman writes. "It remains enough of a problem that Johnson introduced in the Senate this month the Public Safety and Economic Security Communications Act. It would establish basic quality service standards that telecommunications middlemen must adhere to, and it would create within the Federal Communications Commission a registry that those companies must sign onto."

One of the problems is the use of intermediate routers that handle a phone call between its origination and destination, said Richard Coit, executive director of the South Dakota Telecommunications Association. Coit told Harriman, “It’s incredibly frustrating. People make a call, and the call gets handed off to somebody in the middle, and it never gets to us. The FCC rules currently don’t even reach the intermediate carriers. ... They require carriers that originate and terminate calls to provide data. ... But calls can be handed off to a lot of carriers in the process.” Coit "said the problem is worsened by the fact telecommunications is in the midst of a technology change." (Read more)