The Great Plans Communications Company has taken to notifying their customers about the growing problem of rural phone calls that never go through.

Rural Americans in 37 states are experiencing unprecedented problems making and receiving telephone calls on their landline phones.  The problem has grown so much, the Federal Communications Commission has announced it will investigate the 2,000 percent increase in complaints from customers who are fed up with bad phone service.

In a Stop the Cap! special report published this week, we shared details about the deteriorating landline networks owned by AT&T and Verizon.  But the problem extends beyond those phone companies, and is causing more than a little inconvenience for affected customers.

Hospitals report they are increasingly unable to reach rural patients and 911 emergency call centers say a growing number of emergency calls are not getting through.  Callers assume the problem isn’t with their landline telephone company, but with the hospital or 911 call center.

In response, the FCC has created the Rural Call Completion Task Force to investigate delayed, uncompleted, or poor quality calls.

“It’s not only an economic issue, it’s a public safety issue,” said Jill Canfield, the director of legal and industry at the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association.

In parts of Minnesota, problems are not limited to local dial tone service, but also extends to long distance calling.

Members of the Minnesota Telecom Alliance, which represents rural phone companies in Minnesota, discovered growing problems completing calls nearly a year ago.  Customers would dial numbers and be met with silence or uncompleted call intercept recordings.  Other customers, especially in area codes 320 and 218 couldn’t hear or be heard by the other calling party.  Other calls sounded like they were made underwater.

Phone companies also dealing with frustrating long distance problems have taken to their blogs to alert customers.  Great Plains Communications is one example:

For a while now, we’ve been aware of a particularly frustrating situation affecting rural telephone customers around the country.

Across the country, residents of rural communities are unable to receive long distance phone calls or are receiving calls of poor quality due to incomplete or blocked long distance calls. The issue affects landline, toll-free and wireless long distance calls.

So what’s the reason for this? Well, in the U.S., phone calls are carried on a network of phone lines that may be owned by a wide range of companies who charge a fee to carry long distance calls. To cut costs, some long distance companies attempt to use the lowest cost route available even if that route includes providers who aren’t capable of providing good call quality or even completing the call.

The result is thousands of dropped calls or calls with almost no sound quality occurring across the nation. Additional problems that customers have experienced are:

• The caller hears ringing but the receiving party hears nothing.
• The caller’s phone rings, but then hears only “dead air” when the call is answered.
• The call takes an unusually long time to place.
• Garbled, one-way, or otherwise poor call quality on completed calls.
• Callers receive odd or irrelevant recorded messages.

Investigators examining the problem confirm that company’s suspicions that fierce cost-cutting has a lot to do with the problem, especially as phone companies try and save money using cheaper Voice Over IP technology.  While most of the problems seem to afflict long distance calls (and the carriers that handle them), local phone companies like Windstream are also being targeted in the review.

A decade ago, consumers chose their long distance provider.  But today’s bundled service packages often include unlimited long distance, using the phone company’s preferred provider.  Some long distance calls are routed over the least expensive route, even if call quality suffers.

What particularly provokes customers are quality reductions coming at the same time companies like Windstream are raising prices in states like Minnesota.

Windstream defends its network and says it isn’t to blame for the problems.

“The fault is not in our network and not in our system,” Windstream spokesman Scott Morris told the SCTimes. “We do feel like we’re providing high-quality service … in what we can control and fix.”

Don't bother.

Cox’s ambitious plans to get into the cell phone business were already tempered by the cable company’s decision last spring to simply resell Sprint service under the Cox name.  Now it’s “game over” as the company today quietly stopped signing up new customers and will pull the plug on existing ones March 30, 2012.

Those customers already signed up for Cox’s “unbelievably fair” cell service will officially become Sprint customers next April.

In a confidential memo obtained by Engadget, Cox executives ultimately decided it didn’t make sense for the company to invest in a limited range 3G cellular network.

Cox’s plans to utilize the 700MHz wireless spectrum it acquired in 2008 for 3G-powered wireless service began to go wrong almost from inception.  The wireless business is increasingly in the hands of two super-sized companies, thanks to ongoing mergers and acquisitions.  That leaves smaller, regional companies at a competitive disadvantage unless they heavily discount service.  While Cox was contemplating its first 3G network, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint were well on the way to launching next generation 4G service that would have left Cox behind.

Cox itself is a regularly-rumored takeover target, likely by Time Warner Cable.  No cable industry buyer has much interest in a cell phone service.  Shedding it could make the company more attractive for would-be suitors.

Engadget reader Sal Petrarca observed:

“I always thought it ironic when I [heard Cox’s radio ad asking customers] ‘You wouldn’t order cable from the phone company, would you?’ I guess no one is going to be ordering [cell] phones from the cable company now, eh?”

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission late Tuesday ruled against a revised proposal from Bell that could have effectively ended flat rate Internet service across the country, but also allows the phone company to raise wholesale prices for independent Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

The Commission ruled Bell and cable companies like Rogers must sell access to third party providers at a flat rate or priced on speed and the number of users sharing the connection.  The CRTC rejected a Bell-proposed usage-based pricing scheme that would have charged independent ISPs $0.178/GB.

Ultimately, the CRTC came down closest to adopting a proposal from Manitoba-based MTS Allstream, which suggested a variant on speed-based pricing, steering clear of charging based on usage.  Under the CRTC ruling, independent ISPs can purchase unlimited wholesale access based on different speed tiers.  The new pricing formula requires independent providers to carefully gauge their usage when choosing an appropriate amount of bandwidth.  If an independent ISP misjudges how much usage their collective customer base consumes during the month, they could overpay for unused capacity or underestimate usage, leaving customers with congested-related slowdowns.  ISPs will be able to purchase regular capacity upgrades in 100Mbps increments to keep up with demand.  They can also implement network management techniques which may discourage heavy use during peak usage.

The CRTC decision underscores that Internet pricing should be based on speed, not on the volume of data consumed by customers.  That’s a model Stop the Cap! strongly approves because it does not allow providers to monetize broadband usage.

Finkenstein

But that is where the good news ends.  Nothing in the CRTC ruling changes the Internet Overcharging regime already in place at the country’s leading service providers.  Companies like Bell and Rogers are free to continue setting arbitrary limits on usage and charging overlimit fees for those who exceed them.

Konrad von Finckenstein, chair of the CRTC, says the regulator made a mistake in deciding last year to allow Bell to raise its prices for independent service providers.

“Our original decision was clearly not the best one. It was wrong and it was pointed out by a lot of people, including Minister Clement. He was right. We have today fixed it, we have made this new decision,” von Finckenstein said. “The bottom line is that you as a consumer will not face a cap or limitation of use because of anything mandated by the CRTC. Any kind of cap or limit, payment per use, that you will have to pay is because your ISP decides to charge you, not because we mandate it.”

But many independent providers are unhappy with the CRTC ruling because it also allows wholesale providers like Bell to raise prices, sometimes substantially, on the bandwidth they sell.

One independent ISP — TekSavvy, said it faced increased connectivity costs in eastern Canada.

“The CRTC decision is a step back for consumers. The rates approved by the Commission today will make it much harder for independent ISPs to compete”, said TekSavvy CEO Marc Gaudrault. “This is an unfortunate development for telecommunications competition in Canada,” he added.

“Rates are going up,” added Bill Sandiford, president of Telnet Communications and of the Canadian Network Operators Consortium, an independent ISP association.

In addition to whatever rate increases eventually make their way to consumers, some independent providers may end up adopting network management and usage cap policies that attempt to slow down the rate at which they are forced to commit to bandwidth upgrades.  That’s because providers purchase capacity based on what they believe their peak usage rate is likely to be.  Providers will be free to upgrade service in 100Mbps increments.  But with the new, higher prices, providers could overspend on capacity that goes unused or find themselves underestimating usage, creating congestion-related slowdowns for all of their customers.

Angus

Some network management techniques that could reduce peak usage — and the need for upgrades — include speed throttles for heavy users during peak usage times or usage caps that fall away during off-peak hours when network traffic is lower.

Yesterday’s decision will provide some small relief to wholesale buyers of bandwidth in Quebec, where’s Videotron’s sky-high wholesale prices are set to be reduced.  But the unusual divide in Internet pricing between eastern and western Canada will remain.  Western Canadians will continue to enjoy much larger usage allowances, and lower wholesale pricing, than their eastern neighbors in Ontario and Quebec.

The CRTC’s ruling did not go far enough for NDP Digital Issues critic Charlie Angus. Angus notes only 6 percent of Canadians purchase Internet service from independent providers.  The rest will still be stuck with what he calls “unfair billing practices and bandwidth caps.”

Angus is convinced the CRTC just gave the green light to force rate hikes for the minority of consumers who found a way around companies like Bell, Shaw, Videotron, and Rogers.

“Allowing big telecom companies to reach into the pockets of struggling families and ask for even more money is just plain wrong,” Angus said.

Bell’s senior vice-president for regulatory and government affairs, Mirko Bibic, still believes the company’s proposal to charge just under 20c per gigabyte to wholesale users was appropriate, but the CRTC’s permission to allow Bell to increase wholesale rates was a nice consolation prize.  Bibic tried to frame the decision as forcing ‘independent ISPs to pay their fair share.’

Independent ISPs “are going to have to lease more traffic lanes,” he told CTV News. “I think the philosophy is [to] put the independent ISP in a position of responsibility. If usage goes up, you’re going to have to buy more lanes – it’s the same decision that we have to make.”

Days after the citizens of Longmont, Col. turned their backs on an expensive lobbying and astroturf campaigned fueled (not by choice) by Comcast ratepayers, the so-called “community activists” opposed to the community using its own fiber network as it sees fit evaporated into dust, but not before one celebrating citizen took out a giant ad in the local Times-Call newspaper:

As Christopher Mitchell from Community Broadband Networks discovered, “citizen activism” has an expiration date when the industry money stops flowing:

If there had been a shred of local legitimacy among the “Look Before We Leap” group that was run by Denver-based strategists, it probably would have kept its website up for longer than a few days after the election. If I were them, I would want to keep a record for the future.

But they don’t. Because they were just a bunch of paid public relations people working a job. They didn’t oppose Longmont’s initiative, they didn’t know anything about it. They were collecting a paycheck.

And when the money ran out, the days of their website were numbered in the single digits.  The only thing left of lookbeforeweleap.org is a cached copy courtesy of Google.  (And by the way, Squarespace, the hosting company, wants the site owner to contact them.)

Americans for Prosperty's Phil Kerpen on Glenn Beck's show opposing Net Neutrality

Comcast’s propaganda campaign fooled no one.  Borrowing from the cable industry’s bag of old tricks, Look Before We Leap conflated Longmont’s fiber optic network with a few failed Wi-Fi projects run years earlier in concert with Earthlink in other states.

The editors at Times-Call had to respect Comcast and its merry band of dollar-a-holler followers for at least being bold.  After all, they tried to convince voters “that the city having control over its own property was somehow ‘risky.‘”  But of course the cable company would prefer Longmont stay out of the comfortable duopoly it has with phone company CenturyLink.

The newspaper had little time and patience for the antics of “Americans for Prosperity” either.  The hilariously misnamed group funded by large corporations to convince people to vote against their own best interests considers Net Neutrality and community broadband self-empowerment evidence of Marxism — at least that is what policy director Phil Kerpen said on Glenn Beck’s now defunct paranoia festival on Fox News Channel.

Longmont doesn’t put out the welcome mat for corporate influence peddlers.  Voters believe local government can be an effective steward of community resources, something Comcast subscribers don’t believe applies to a cable company that shovels hundreds of channels most people never watch and expects annual rate increases to help pay for them.

Times-Call’s Tony Kindelspire:

Ask a local businessperson how Longmont having its own electric utility is working out for them. We have some of the cheapest rates in the country.

It takes leadership to stand up against big business lobbyists to act on behalf of what you think is right, not what’s going to raise you the most amount of campaign cash the next time around. How very, very refreshing it was to see, and I hope it’s a lesson that spreads far and wide.

So do we.