Abandoned Rural Calls

I’m hearing an increasing number of stories from rural internet service providers and telephone companies about voice calls that are not completing to their customers. People place a call to customers on a rural network and give up when they don’t hear the phone ringing at the receiving end of the call in a reasonable amount of time. The industry term for this phenomenon is an abandoned call, which generally occurs when the caller assumes the call didn’t work. You might assume that this means that something is wrong with the public switched telephone network that is stopping calls from being completed. That would be a huge problem, and one that would also affect calls made to urban areas. From what I’m hearing, this is strictly a rural problem. I think it is far more likely that this is happening for financial reasons and is related to the fees charged to terminate long-distance calls. I think the resurgence of abandoned calls is due to least-cost routing, where long-distance companies use real-time software to determine the lowest cost to get a call completed.