WHY DIDN’T YOU ANSWER YOUR PHONE???!!!!

Have you ever heard that question from a relative, friend or a business that has been trying to reach you? It is a problem that is happening more and more frequently in Missouri and across all of rural America.

The telecommunications industry continues to evolve at a record breaking pace. New technologies and services are being introduced on a daily basis. Sometimes with rapid change come unforeseen problems for our customers’ level of service.

The Local Exchange Service Providers, such as Chariton Valley Telephone and others, have developed a public network over the past hundred years to complete our customers’ calls and provide a very high level of service quality, 99.999% of the time. Recent changes to the way some calls are routed by unscrupulous long distance providers; however, are having a detrimental impact on the quality of service we are able to provide.

A recent problem has surfaced involving the termination of long distance calls, especially in rural states such Missouri. The call may be originated from inside or outside of the state using a variety of telephone technologies including land-line, wireless, cable and VoIP (voice over internet protocol). The calling party may experience one or more of the following issues when making a call:
• The calling party hears ringing but the called party hears nothing
• The called party hears ringing but only hears dead air when the call is answered
• Unusually long call set-up times, sometimes as long as 50 seconds
• One way or poor quality, garbled voice on completed calls
• Inability to receive faxes
• Missing or altered Caller ID

The problem is most of these troubled calls never reach the public network on the terminating end. In other words, your local telephone company and the called party do not even know the call has been placed. The called party may have relatives or friends and even businesses say they called at a time when the person knew they were by their phone, but it never rang.

This situation, which is referred to as “Call Termination Problems”, is becoming an epidemic concern in rural America. It is being investigated by the Federal Communications Commission, national telephone organizations, and state authorities. It is not only an inconvenience and nuisance for the residence and business customer, but could also impact public safety in rural areas across the country. Reports suggest that some the unscrupulous long distance providers have trained their customer service representatives to blame the terminating local telephone company, such as Chariton Valley, rather than accepting responsibility for their own shoddy business practices.

If you experience this problem, please notify the originating long distance carrier or provider of the person who attempted to place the call to you. The person who placed the call will need the following information:
• Date and time of call
• The number that was used to place the call
• The number that was called
• Description of the problem (i.e. dead air, ringing with no answer, etc.)

If you speak with the long distance provider, keep track of the following information:
• Record the name of the long distance provider
• The date, name and number of the customer service representative you spoke with
• The response/help/direction you received from that customer service representative

Chariton Valley Telephone will attempt to assist in resolving the problem but, as previously stated, we will not have any record or knowledge of the call being placed. Our objective has always been, and will continue to be, to provide high quality telephone, broadband and other communication services to our customers. It will remain our highest priority.