Phone companies are likely to cut your landline cord for you

CHICAGO – If you haven't cut the cord on your landline phone service, pretty soon you may not have a choice.

The Illinois Telecommunications Act is up for review this spring, and big phone companies are expected to push to eliminate a legal obligation to provide landlines, which are still the cheapest and most reliable form of phone service.

In a measure being pushed by big telecom provider AT&T in states across the nation, consumer advocates say, the phone company wants to eliminate the act's "obligation to serve" requirement, which gives everyone in the state the right to landline service.

That would open the door for phone companies to abandon areas they deem unprofitable.

Illinois still is home to about 1.3 million residential landlines, which is costly for service providers like AT&T and Frontier. It means maintaining copper wires, often in far flung areas, for a service that is increasingly disappearing.

Landline providers such as AT&T operate two networks at the same time — the old Time Division Multiplexing system (your landline) and a new fiber-optic system that can provide voice calling and Internet-tied entertainment services. The company has said it plans to abandon the old system by 2020.

Jon Banks, senior vice president of law and policy at USTelecom, an industry trade association, said in the past four years in Illinois, traditional phone companies have lost a large portion of market share. In 2008, those phone companies served 58 percent of households. In 2012, that dropped to 29 percent.

For consumers, landlines are the most inexpensive form of phone service. If providers succeed, landline customers could be forced to sign up for pricier alternatives — such as wireless service or broadband Internet to have access to a traditional telephone.

In California, where the telecom industry succeeded in its lobbying efforts, AT&T flat-rate service increased 115 percent to $23 per month in 2013 from $10.69 per month in 2006. Verizon increased 27 percent to $22 per month from $17.25 per month, according to Keystone Research Center, a Pennsylvania policy research group.

That has consumer advocates concerned that rural areas where cellphone service is spotty could be unduly punished and residents with medical alert bracelets and other medical devices tied to landlines could be in danger.

In January 2014, the FCC agreed that the world is moving away from landlines.