• A growing number of rural customers report difficulties receiving long distance calls.
• Numerous reports describe calls that: ring at the caller's end, but not the called party’s; "time out"; have inaccurate or garbled caller ID; have dramatically low voice quality.
• Problems lie with the originating carriers and/or routing of calls prior to the rural company's network.
• Includes calls originating from wireline, wireless, interconnected Voice over IP and Voice over IP systems.
• 80% of Telephone Companies responding to an industry survey reported termination problems.

• Consumers are lodging complaints with the FCC and state commissions.
• The integrity of the Public Switched Telephone Network is at risk.
• Customers turn to local phone companies for resolution of problems that occur on another company's network.
• Customers suffer missed calls.
• Local phone companies endure loss of good will.
• Local phone companies expend resources to chase problems "countless hours, weeks, days….Once we make the initial contact (with the originating network), they pass it off as someone else's problem".

• The Commission should affirm the duty of all providers to route calls properly for completion regardless of the technology used in the transport of those calls.
• The Commission should affirm the duty of providers to supply accurate and complete caller ID for the actual customer who originated the call.
• The Commission must ensure that users' reliance on the Nation's communications network is not misplaced or undermined.

1. The time the call was placed
2. The phone number from which the call originated
3. The long distance or wireless provider for the phone number from which the call originated
4. Details about what, if anything, occurred on the receiving end of the call.

Washington, D.C. Today the Federal Communications Commission announced the creation of the Rural Call Completion Task Force to investigate and address the growing problem of calls to rural customers that are being delayed or that fail to connect.

Rural “call completion” problems are a serious issue that the Commission has been grappling with over the past few months. Local phone providers in rural areas have reported an alarming increase in complaints from customers that long distance calls and faxes are not reaching them. Other complaints include poor call quality and incorrect caller ID information, showing perhaps an unfamiliar local number for a long-distance call. It’s a persistent and ongoing concern affecting 80% of rural carriers recently surveyed by a rural telephone company trade association on the issue.