WASHINGTON — The staff at Horn Memorial Hospital in rural Ida Grove, Iowa, were frustrated when trying to call the doctors of people rushed into their emergency room.

In trying to learn if patients were taking medications, staff would dial and hear the phone ring. Then the line would go dead, said Michelle Weber, clinical director at the hospital about 60 miles southeast of Sioux City.

The same thing happened to patients trying to make appointments at the hospital’s clinic in rural Mapleton.

The situation has since improved, Weber said. But at Mattracks, a Minnesota company that makes tracks for the wheels of tractors, sales representative Roger Brazier said he still hears from frustrated customers who’ve tried calling in orders.

The phone never rang at the business in Karlstad, a town of about 800 people near the Canadian border.

“They’d e-mail and say, ‘Are you guys still in business?'” Brazier said.

Both experiences reflect a reality of rural phone service.

Just because no one answers doesn’t mean no one’s around. The phone might not even be ringing at all.

Instead, many calls are intentionally dropped by carriers that specialize in connecting calls and who are discouraged by the economics of patching calls through to rural America, say officials at small town phone companies and the Federal Communications Commission, as well as members of Congress trying to tackle the issue.

Those intermediary companies play an important role in the game of telephone, since long-distance calls usually aren’t connected straight from a caller’s carrier to the company of the person on the other end.

Instead, long-distance carriers such as Verizon pass a call to an intermediate provider, paying a fee for the call to be passed along to the next step.

The intermediary uses software that finds the cheapest place to send the call — which could be a recipient’s phone company.

But sometimes the intermediary decides the fee it must pay to a rural carrier to complete the call — which can be higher than what it would pay to an urban carrier — leaves it too little profit.

So it simply drops the call, said Jill Canfield, vice president and assistant general counsel at the National Telephone Cooperative Association in Washington.

Other times, the intermediary hands off the call to another intermediate provider, which may pass it on to yet another.

“So the call gets stuck in a loop,” said Canfield, whose association represents rural phone companies.

A 2013 FCC prohibition on fake rings seems to have eased a particularly annoying aspect of the problem, said Eric Keber, director of government affairs for the Western Telecommunications Alliance, an advocacy group for rural phone companies.

Some intermediate providers used to send a ringing sound to callers — even if the phones weren’t ringing on the other end of the line.

That still happens sometimes, said Dave Bickett, general manager of the Park Region Mutual Telephone Company in Underwood, Minn.

Overall it’s not certain how many calls are dropped. But in 2012, another telecommunications trade group, the National Exchange Carrier Association, made 6,824 calls to rural areas. It found 6.4 percent did not go through, according to a letter filed with the FCC.

Of 581 calls placed to non-rural numbers, only .5 percent were not connected.

Steven Steele, general manager of People’s Telephone Cooperative in Winnsboro, Texas, said things seem to have improved. For its outgoing calls, his company connected with an intermediate provider that doesn’t drop calls.

Also, fewer incoming calls involving his customers are dropped since other long-distance services are taking more care in choosing partners, he said, likely as a result of FCC actions against long-distance phone companies.

In January 2015, Verizon agreed to pay $2 million to the FCC and spend another $3 million to combat dropped calls, settling an investigation that it hadn’t done enough to deal with “persistently low” call completion rates in rural areas.

Steele said he hears other phone companies around the state are still having problems.

In June, the National Exchange Carrier Association said 70 percent of 242 rural phone companies it surveyed reported problems with dropped calls in the prior year.

The same month, the Senate Commerce Committee passed a bill sponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., requiring the FCC to set minimum standards for intermediate providers and requiring the companies to register with the government. Long-distance companies would only be allowed to connect calls with registered intermediaries.

A similar measure sponsored by Rep. David Young, R-Iowa, was approved in a House subcommittee earlier this month.

“There’s no question it’s a problem. I hear about this more when I travel around the state, more than you can imagine,” said Rep. Dave Loebsack, D-Iowa, a co-sponsor of the bill.

Bob Stafford, executive vice president of the Oklahoma Telephone Association, said phone companies in his state also get complaints from rural businesses.

Eventually people give up trying to call and instead take their business to a company in a metro area, he said.

Bickett, whose phone company serves a rural area 70 miles southeast of Fargo, N.D., said people have been unable to get through to an automated line to pay traffic tickets.

Dropped calls have also been a hassle for law enforcement, Lance Miller, president of the McClure Telephone Company, told the House Communications and Technology Subcommittee this month.

Miller’s company serves 600 households in McClure, Ohio, an aging community 40 miles southwest of Toledo. Many younger people have moved away but call home to check on parents.

Sometimes they get only dead air or continuous ringing, he said.

After three or four attempts, he said, “The kids will start to get worried and will then understandably call our local sheriff’s department to request someone check in on their parents.

“When the deputies arrive at the home, they find mom and dad sitting down watching the ‘Price is Right’ and having a cup of coffee — not realizing that anyone was trying to contact them,” he said.

 

Kery Murakami is the Washington, D.C., reporter for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach him at kmurakami@cnhi.com.