Interestingly, I just received this notice from my local telco (Whidbey Telecom):
UPDATE On the National Call Termination Issue
In recent months there have been a number of telephone subscribers across the country reporting difficulties with their long distance calls. Whidbey Telecom has also received reports from some of our customers that their friends, family and/or business associates have had problems placing calls to our rural area. We investigated each of these reports and determined that the troubles experienced by our customers with receiving long distance calls were related to this national issue. We have been in contact with a variety of state and national telecommunications organizations and have gathered information on the types of call issues being experienced as well as information on what is being done to correct the overall matter. We would like to share some of this information with you, the progress being made and how you can support our investigation. We hope you will find it helpful.
Whidbey Telecom continues to cooperate with several national telephone associations in providing information to them on the scope of these issues. These national associations have concluded these issues are part of "an epidemic affecting the routing of calls to customers in rural areas nationwide." They are continuing to collect data from telephone companies affected by these issues and have spent considerable time researching this issue and raising awareness among stakeholders at all levels of the industry. The national associations filed a letter detailing this growing epidemic with the Enforcement Bureau at the Federal Communications Commission ("FCC") and are continuing to work with the FCC to further investigate the problem. We are pleased to report that the Enforcement Bureau responded to this request by contacting the carriers responsible for originating the majority of the problem calls. At this time, some carriers have contacted the national associations to discuss the issue further.
These call termination issues can occur on calls originated from a variety of telephone technologies including landline, wireless, cable, and VoIP. The issues experienced may include, but are not limited to the following:
* The calling party hears ringing but the called party hears nothing;
* The called party hears ringing but hears only dead air when they answer the call;
* Calls take sometimes as long as 50 seconds to setup, before the calling/called party hears a ring;
* Garbled, one way or otherwise poor quality voice transmission on completed calls;
* Inability to receive Faxes;
* Missing or altered Caller ID.
It would seem that the first item in the above list is what is happening to me. The odd thing is this worked just fine yesterday!