Verizon Agrees to $5 Million Settlement Over Rural Call Completion

$2 million fine and commit to spend $3 million over the next three years to improve rural call completion, an agency news release said. Enforcement Bureau Chief Travis LeBlanc said, “Phone companies are on notice that the FCC will hold them accountable for failures to investigate and ensure that calls go through to the rural heartland of the country.” Verizon failed to investigate evidence of low completion rates “over a period of many months” in 2013, the release said. Verizon said in a statement that its networks are “highly reliable and successfully complete calls to all destinations -- including rural areas.” The company has been working with the agency and rural partners to analyze and test the completion of phone calls in rural areas, the company said. The consent decree puts in place a formal plan to do the analysis. The settlement "is an important reminder that rural areas like Vermont deserve equal access to quality communications services," said Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., in a statement. "Vermonters rightly expect that when they pick up the phone, their calls will go through." Improving rural call completion rests on providers tracking "whether calls are completing and to investigate why calls may be failing," said NTCA CEO Shirley Bloomfield in a statement, applauding the enforcement action.