FCC to investigate call termination issues

CC Communications and numerous other rural telephone carriers are working with the Federal Communications Commission to resolve call termination issues related to incoming and outgoing long-distance calls.

These issues include, but are not limited to:

  1. The calling party hears ringing but the called party hears nothing;
  2. The called party hears ringing but hears only dead air when they answer;
  3. Unusually long call set-up times, sometimes as long as 50-60 seconds;
  4. Garbled, one way or otherwise poor quality voice on completed calls;
  5. Inability to receive or send faxes;
  6. Missing or altered Caller ID.

Says Bob Adams, CC Communications General Manager, “Several national telephone associations have gathered information on the scope of these issues and concluded this is an epidemic affecting the routing of calls to customers in rural areas.

“The problem occurs on calls originated using a variety of telephone technologies, including land-line, wireless, cable, and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP),” he continues. ”

“CC Communications and the other rural telephone companies have no control over these issues. The problems occur before the call ever reaches our network — if the call reaches our network at all — or after it is handed off from the CC Communications network to the long-distance carriers.

“CC Communications is working with the national telephone associations in collecting data to provide to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for further investigation of this problem, and the FCC has tentatively scheduled an October 18 workshop in response to our request,” Adams concludes.

To assist with resolving the issue, Dave Tilley, Broadband Supervisor for CC Communications, states, “Calling parties should open a trouble ticket with their own telephone company when they determine they cannot reach the called party or they experience poor call quality.

“CC Comm subscribers should call 611 to report an issue,” he notes. “When reporting the problem, the calling party should include the following details:

  • Date and time of call
  • The number that was used to place the call
  • The number that was called
  • A description of the problem (i.e., dead air, ringing with no answer, etc.).”