Federal Communications Commission FCC 14-175 
1
STATEMENT OF
COMMISSIONER AJIT PAI
Re: Rural Call Completion, WC Docket No. 13-39.
When you dial a phone number, you expect your call to go through.  And yet, when many try to 
call a family member or a business in rural America, they hear an endless series of rings, dead air, or a 
busy signal even when someone is ready to answer on the other side.  No one deserves such a broken 
system.  It’s not fair to those who live or have loved ones in small towns and villages.  And as Senators 
Michael B. Enzi, John Thune, Pat Roberts, James M. Inhofe, Jerry Moran, John Boozman, John Barrasso, 
John Hoeven, Orrin G. Hatch, and Deb Fischer reminded us just a few weeks ago, “[r]ural businesses are 
particularly impacted when calls are not completed because they risk losing valuable business.”
Last year we took the first step to fixing the problem by deciding what information we needed to 
collect to diagnose the problem.  Today’s resolution of the five pending petitions for reconsideration is 
step number two.  The Office of Management and Budget will then need to sign off, carriers will need to 
report the data, and our hardworking staff in the Wireline Competition Bureau will need to analyze it.  At 
that point, at long last, we should have the information we need in order to fix the problem—and it can’t 
come soon enough.