CenturyLink landlines with no dial tone, no ring, and no service.

It happened to Vicky Ethen’s 97-year-old father, Otis, last June.

So, she called the Louisiana-based carrier for help.

“It was down, we would call, and you would get the prerecorded line saying they’re working on it,” Ethen recalls. “You couldn’t get through to anybody.”

The Ethen’s aren’t alone.

The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC) says it received at least 75 CenturyLink outage complaints just in December.  

CenturyLink blames the outages on ‘multiple cases of copper theft.’

“This is internet and plain old telephone going through these wires,” explains Mark, a retired AT&T worker who doesn’t want his full name used.

He says he’s found numerous vandalized CenturyLink pedestal boxes containing copper wire.

“This has gotten too bad; they’ve got to fix the boxes,” Mark declares. “They should have a team going around, fixing, locking down the boxes, keeping people out of the wire.”

The PUC says in recent years, CenturyLink has cut its field crew workforce in half.

Mark says a CenturyLink field tech told him the number of company workers in the metro has dropped dramatically.  

“He said when he started many years ago, there was 500 doing what he’s doing. There’s only 100 of them now,” he notes.

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Minnesota State Sen. Mark Koran (R-North Branch) says he’s been in talks with CenturyLink to find alternative solutions.

“Public Safety and the health of our residents matters in some form of communication,” he declares.

Koran says the copper wire system for carriers is now about 100 years old.

He says CenturyLink needs to think about new alternatives, including Wi-Fi, a cell phone distribution plan or broadband expansion.

“They have to have a plan and if that plan means putting in a Wi-Fi hotspot or whatever an alternative communication plan is, they should be obligated to do that,” Koran says.

Ethen says her father was without landline service for at least a month, despite a request from the PUC that he should be a priority case.

She explains she bought her father an amplified phone connected to a cell device as a backup.

But Ethen says the state needs to act.  

“Either legislation needs to be put in place that doesn’t allow this or there needs to be some oversight or some kind of penalty or something needs to happen with this,” she says.