President Donald Trump has signed into law the Improving Rural Call Quality and Reliability Act of 2017 (Act), and puts into motion the FCC’s ability to improve rural call quality. After the Act was signed into law, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai released a statement observing that “[f]or far too long, many rural Americans have faced a communications problem that you’d think would be a relic from a century ago: They can’t reliably receive long-distance phone calls. Some calls drop; others are never connected at all. This is unacceptable, and it’s a problem we at the FCC intend to fix.” He went on to add that the Act would allow “the agency to oversee a significant source of rural call completion failures: so-called ‘intermediate’ carriers who carry calls between originating carriers (on the caller’s side) and terminating carriers (on the recipient’s side).”
