Incoming phone calls are often dropped, rural residents say

Rural residents are complaining that some phone calls don't reach their landlines, but the reasons are murky.

"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," Drew FitzGerald reports for The Wall Street Journal. "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."

In at least one complaint, a failed call interfered with a medical transport for a hospital patient.

A possible culprit: low-cost "middlemen" carriers that telecoms use to route long-distance calls to local exchanges. "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," FitzGerald reports. T-Mobile was fined $40 million last year after it was found to have inserted fake ringtones to make callers feel they were reaching the rural number they had called, FitzGerald reports.

The problem may be difficult to solve. Long-distance companies say the problem is too infrequent to figure out a pattern that can be addressed. And the middlemen operate with little oversight, FitzGerald reports.

"Congress passed legislation in February 2018 that would help the FCC address the problem by requiring intermediary phone companies to register with the agency," FitzGerald reports. "In October, the FCC implemented part of that law by ordering telephone companies with more than 100,000 phone lines to keep up-to-date contact information about themselves. Starting as soon as next month, the FCC will launch the registry of middlemen that handle calls for other companies."