Trump Signs Improving Rural Call Quality and Reliability Act; Pai Hails New FCC Mandate
President Donald Trump signed into law the Improving Rural Call Quality and Reliability Act (S-96) Monday, the White House said. The House cleared the bill earlier this month along with the Kari's Law Act (HR-582), which Trump previously signed (see…
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1802090050 and 1802160032). FCC Chairman Ajit Pai welcomed the bill's signing, saying it was "unacceptable" that many rural Americans continue to have problems receiving long-distance calls. The new law "gives the FCC another tool to tackle this problem head-on," empowering 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)," he said. "The FCC now can also establish service quality standards for call completion by intermediate carriers, and the tools to hold them accountable.“