We have great news for our customers who have been dealing with the terminating toll issue!
The Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) has reached an agreement with Level 3 Communications that addresses many of the issues that our customers have faced in regards to call completion.
We know that for almost three years, many of our customers have experienced problems with completion of long distance calls on their Great Plains Communications phone service. During this time, our service personnel have worked with our customers and the customers of other carriers who have had difficulties completing calls to Great Plains Communications customers. We have reported these issues to both the FCC and the Nebraska Public Service Commission, both of which have had ongoing investigations on rural call completion.
The new pledge by Level 3 is going to be a large step forward in helping to fix these issues. The full agreement states that Level 3 will meet “rigorous, verifiable call completion standards and to provide extensive records that will assist FCC enforcement of rules protecting against failed calls to rural areas.” Level 3 also will make a $975,000 voluntary contribution to the U.S. Treasury, and has agreed to make additional $1 million voluntary contributions going forward if it misses quarterly benchmarks.
Our CEO, Todd Foje, had this to say on the matter. “We are pleased that regulators finally took some action with at least one carrier, in what is clearly an admission that this carrier was intentionally not completing calls to rural carriers, but based on the volume of customer reports we have received, we believe there are other long distance carriers that have also been causing these issues. Hopefully those carriers will take this announcement seriously.”
Of course, we will continue to work with our customers who have problems receiving long distance calls from outside Great Plains Communications service areas. Customers can call us at 1-855-853-1483 if they are having problems, and our personnel will do our best to work with the originating customers and report these problems to those customers’ service providers for resolution.
Customers can also submit complaints on in-state long distance call completion problems to the Nebraska Public Service Commission https://www.psc.nebraska.gov/ or 1-800-526-0017 and on interstate long distance problems to the FCC https://www.fcc.gov/topic/complaints.