Northwest Iowa — Those telephone directories that get delivered to your door every year may be going the way of the dodo bird, if Iowa telephone companies get their way. Telephone company representatives are asking the Iowa Utilities Board for new rules to, as they say, “bring telecommunications in Iowa into the modern era.”
Michael Sadler, of CenturyLink, a company which provides telephone services to a large number of northwest Iowans, says the paper books are getting used less and less all the time.
Proposed new rules would require phone companies to deliver paper phone books only upon request. Anthony Carroll, with A-A-R-P, argues many elderly Iowans, and others, don’t have internet access to look up phone numbers, so there should be a gradual phaseout of the paper books.
AARP also opposes proposed new rules that would give phone companies more time to restore service when landline phones go down.
