Federal Communications Commission	"FCC  XX-XXX"


STATEMENT OF
COMMISSIONER JESSICA ROSENWORCEL, 
APPROVING IN PART, CONCURRING IN PART

Re: 	Rural Call Completion, WC Docket No. 13-39.

Communications requires trust.  When you pick up the phone to place a call, you should have every confidence that your call will go through.  But in too many places in rural America, that is not happening.  Calls to family and friends will ring and ring without ever being answered.  Business connections will never get made.  And worse, calls to public safety may not go through.  
For too long, consumers in rural communities—and the carriers that serve them—have complained about this problem.  Over the last few years, the FCC has answered their call, putting in place new policies to improve call completion.  But still this problem persists.  So Congress sought to help when it passed the Rural Call Quality and Reliability Act.  Under this law, last year the FCC adopted an intermediate carrier registry to improve call path transparency.  Pursuant to the same legislation, here we establish service quality standards.  They include a general duty to complete calls and monitor carriers responsible for call transfer and completion.  I support the broad outlines of this effort.  But let’s be honest, the service quality standards we adopt today are weak tea.  They lack the kind of objective criteria that make it easy to identify when problems arise.  Because I would have preferred to put clearer rules of the road in place, I will concur in part.  I also believe going forward we need to be especially vigilant because the only acceptable outcome is putting an end to this problem—and restoring trust.



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