Daily Yonder has been great for rural perspectives on telecom policies lately. Recently they posted an update on call completion decisions made by the FCC. I’ve tracked call completion in the blog before; it’s a big deal for rural customers. The issue is that some new phone over Internet options have had different rules and goals from traditional phone companies.

I’ll risk misstating the issue to make it very simple. (Folks are welcome to correct me.) Traditionally phone companies have paid other phone companies to accept their calls. “Your customer in NY wants to reach my customer in International Falls MN? Pay me a nickel and I’ll complete the call.” New companies didn’t necessarily sign up for this agreement. So eventually the local phone companies quit accepting those calls and/or the new internet phone companies sent the calls into a limbo rather than pay the surcharge.

What the customers experienced was that Bob in NYC ran into troubles every time he tried to call grandma in International Falls. To ensure customer quality, the FCC stepped in and up. Here’s the assessment from the Daily Yonder…

The problem got so bad that the Federal Communications Commission got involved at the request of some rural phone companies, state utilities commissions and other consumer advocates.

Earlier this month the FCC reached a $875,000 settlement with a Texas company, Matrix Telecom, for dropping calls to rural customers. In February, Windstream agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle a similar complaint. And last year another phone company, Level 3, agreed to pay nearly $1 million because of call-routing issues.

Plenty of folks – including the ranking member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, John Thune (R-South Dakota) – think the FCC needs to do even more to correct this problem. They seem to disagree with Senator Johnson’s notion that competition without enforcement of the rules will make sure that rural Americans get a fair shake.

The problem of rural call completion is not over, but it’s getting better. Bad actors are on notice that someone with leverage is paying attention. And there’s a very good chance the problem will continue to improve if the FCC sticks to its guns. (If you think you’ve got a problem with dropped calls to rural areas, you can report it to the FCC here.)