FCC Releases Rural Call Completion Notice of Proposed Rulemaking

The FCC states that intermediate, wholesale long-distance carriers may be failing to deliver a significant number of calls to rural areas, while retail long-distance carriers may not be adequately monitoring the rural call completion performance of these wholesale carriers.

The FCC is proposing to adopt rules that would require facilities-based originating long-distance carriers to collect and retain basic information on call attempts and to periodically undertake call completion analyses and report the results to the FCC. As part of these proposed rules, any originating long-distance carrier that has more than 100,000 retail long-distance subscribers would be required to:
 

• Measure the call answer rate for each rural operating company number (OCN) to which 100 or more calls are attempted per month;
• Submit to the FCC monthly call completion data segregated by rural and non-rural OCNs on a quarterly basis; and
• Retain records for the preceding six months concerning each long-distance call handled in a readily retrievable form.

The FCC seeks comment on these proposed rules, with initial comments due 30 days after publication of the NPRM in the Federal Register. Reply comments are due 45 days after publication in the Federal Register. A copy of the NPRM can be found here.