Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.A year ago, Brian Berner started having major issues with his cell and landline phone service that have rattled his family-owned business.
He wasn't getting his calls. Not on his cellphone. Not on his landline. But the customers were calling. It was as if the calls were disappearing into thin air.
Berner is a third-generation owner of Belden Grain and Feed, a company that sells corn and soybeans to farmers within a 30-mile radius of Belden, a small town about 125 miles northwest of Omaha. And his company needs to be well-connected.
As commodity prices on the Chicago Board of Trade pingpong up and down by the second, farmers and customers who are tracking the markets require reliable access to Berner so they can lock in feed prices based on market levels. If Berner's customers can't reach him, they could lose money — and Berner could lose their business.
So last December, when customers started coming in and complaining that they weren't able to get through to Berner on his cellphone or landline phone, he was puzzled. His phones never rang. "It's pretty disgusting when you're paying for the service and you're simply not getting it," he said.
Over the last 90 days, after working with Verizon Wireless and Pioneer Telephone Co., his landline provider, Berner said his situation has improved. But the problem continues to be an ongoing concern for thousands of Americans who live in rural areas and has received the attention of the Federal Communications Commission and a group of U.S. senators, including Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb.
"This increasing lack of telephone call dependability is a risk to public safety, a limitation on rural communities staying connected and a hindrance that costs our small businesses time and money," Nelson said.
In a 2011 survey of roughly 200 rural local exchange carriers, the small, independent phone companies that serve sparsely populated areas, about 80 percent of the companies said they've had issues with call routing and termination problems. From late 2007 until early 2011, the same survey found 10,163 individual complaints were lodged nationwide from rural customers plagued with unexplained call termination.
The states that have been hit hardest all have significant rural populations: Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, South Dakota, Illinois, Vermont, Michigan, Washington, Idaho, Indiana and Oregon.
The number of complaints began to spike in October 2010, and, between April 2010 and March 2011, call-termination complaints spiked 2,000 percent, the survey found.
Those findings and the ongoing complaints this month prompted Nelson and 22 other U.S. senators — including Sens. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa — to send a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachoski urging the agency to expedite an ongoing investigation into the complicated issue.
The letter said the company where phone calls originate should be held accountable for the problem. "No carrier subject to the FCC jurisdiction should be able to wash its hands of call completion," the senators wrote.
According to the FCC, the termination problems are happening in rural areas where long-distance carriers — companies like Windstream Communications and CenturyLink, for example — have to pay high fees to the local telephone companies to complete calls that originate on their long-distance networks.
To minimize the fees that they pay, called Intercarrier Compensation, the long-distance carriers commonly use third-party network routers that connect the calls to the local networks as cheaply as possible.
But sometimes the third-party routers fail, or choose not to connect the calls, transmit the caller identification information or complete the faxes, Sharon Gillett and Jamie Barnett, who head the FCC's Wireline Competition and Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureaus, wrote in a January FCC report.
Although the issue is still being investigated, the FCC is hopeful that new federal rules that went into effect at the end of 2011 to reform Intercarrier Compensation, or ICC, will curb the rural hangup problems.
The new rules bar telecommunications companies from blocking or dropping calls to avoid high termination fees. And over time, the FCC will completely phase out the ICC fees that officials say are at the heart of the rural termination problems.
Verizon Communications, which is the largest cellular provider in Nebraska, said it has been cooperating with the FCC's investigation into the issue since June. The company is confident the new ICC rules will curb the issue over time, but since that will take years, the company is actively working with customers like Berner and other parties to get to the bottom of the problem.
"Calls are coming from a wide variety of places — cable, wireline, wireless, Internet voice providers and others — so there could be issues in any number of places for any number of reasons," said Karen Smith, a Verizon spokeswoman. "We want all calls to and from our customers to go through, whether it's a wireless customer calling a family member in Lincoln, or a wireline customer ordering a pizza down the block."
Some officials are calling for steep punishments for the companies causing the issues.
Nebraska Public Service Commissioner Anne Boyle said the issue in Nebraska has been hard to pinpoint. Rural carriers have pointed fingers at the long-distance carriers, who then place blame on the third-party routers.
"It's generally some smaller operation" at fault, Boyle said. "It's like finding a needle in a haystack. But we know that (the problem) is there."
She said that once the FCC concludes its investigation, the routers or operators found to be at fault "should have their licenses yanked."
The hangups, or sometimes unintelligible call quality, affect regular consumers, businesses like Berner's, and can pose safety issues when emergency 911 calls and public safety dispatchers are involved.
Luckily for Berner, the hangups he's experienced haven't had a dramatic impact on his business. His customers, he said, are loyal, but have grown increasingly frustrated when he doesn't receive their calls.
"I don't know how many business transactions I've missed out on because I haven't been able to make or receive a call," he said. "There's a lot of money that can be made or lost ... and when you're depending on the markets, seconds count.
"The bottom line is that in this day and age, the technology is supposed to be so much better, but sometimes I can't even make a simple phone call."
Contact the writer: 402-444-1414, ross.boettcher@owh.com; twitter.com/rossboettcher
Copyright ©2012 Omaha World-Herald®. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, displayed or redistributed for any purpose without permission from the Omaha World-Herald.
