Rural customers want to keep analog phones -- and so does the industry
Somewhere in the South Dakota badlands, 79-year-old Emmer Hulce is clutching an analog cellphone — and if you want it, you'll have to pry it out of his cold dead hands. In sparsely populated parts of rural America, cellphone customers like Hulce are battling to keep their analog connections, even as the government tries to push them to go digital. But these aren't just some elderly cranks tilting at windmills; the customers have the cellphone industry on their side. Both the Rural Cellular Association and the CTIA support suspending an FCC deadline requiring providers to have 95% of customers on e911-compatible digital phones by the end of this year, saying digital isn't ready to serve rural customers. Of course, the fact that carriers have lagged in upgrading networks in rural areas might have something to do with that — and that's what this story is really about: not some old backwoods Luddites avoiding new technology, but about an industry trying to avoid spending money to bring those customers into the 21st century.
