What if you lived in a telephone dead zone? Where people called you and you never got the ring? How would you do business? What if there was an emergency? How would you get asked to prom?

Some rural areas are experiencing this problem with dropped calls. The Minnesota Star Tribune recently ran an article about it. (I have written about it too – because it’s an ongoing problem.)

They describe the problem…

Rural telephone connection problems continue to plague remote communities in Minnesota and across the country. A national test of 2,150 rural calls in 2011 showed that 344 never reached their destination and another 172 were “unacceptably delayed or of poor quality,” according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Critics claim that some cut-rate long distance routers moving calls in the middle of the nation’s telecommunications network simply do not connect rural calls to avoid expensive connection fees. No one is sure how many of these intermediate carriers exist because they don’t have to register with the government. They can set up operations simply by downloading free software on the Internet and filing a rate plan with phone companies.

“It’s outrageous to have fly-by-night carriers just dump the calls,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who with Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., and Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., recently introduced legislation to try to fix rural call problems that she calls ­“literally devastating.”

And what Senator Klobuchar is trying to do to solve the issues.

Klobuchar, Tester and Merkley hope to get the FCC to establish basic quality standards for rural phone calls with their “Improving Rural Call Quality and Reliability Act.”

Tester sponsored a similar bill last year that did not get out of committee. Klobuchar helped get a different resolution about rural call completion passed in 2013 by the Senate Commerce Committee that led to some FCC action, but did not completely resolve the problems. Pushing for carrier registration and the disqualification of carriers who do not complete rural calls are keys to combating a destructive technological breakdown, she said.