In this Wednesday, April 14, 2016 photo, Peter Froehlich holds the landline telephone he uses at his rural home in Whitefield, Maine. Across the country, telecom companies are lobbying lawmakers to be released from their mandate of providing service to every home. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
In this Wednesday, April 14, 2016 photo, Peter Froehlich holds the landline telephone he uses at his rural home in Whitefield, Maine. Across the country, telecom companies are lobbying lawmakers to be released from their mandate of providing service to every home. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

Whitefield, Maine — Peter Froehlich lives at the end of a milelong dirt road in a part of Maine where pickup trucks share the right of way with wandering dairy cows. The local cable company won’t run a line down the road, and his cellphone is useless because he lives in a wireless dead zone.

Now Froehlich, 70, worries a new Maine law will eventually allow the telephone company to unplug him from the plain old telephone service he depends on.

Maine is joining a growing group of states that have passed laws to limit or remove requirements that telephone companies provide traditional, price-controlled phone service — in essence, moving toward a day when plain old landline phone service goes from an endangered species to extinct.

Thirteen states in the past three years have said telephone companies can use alternative technology, like wireless and broadband Internet, to provide basic service. Maine is the first to end basic phone service mandates in communities where there is competition, said Sherry Lichtenberg, principal at the National Regulatory Research Institute.

FairPoint said that it will still offer landline service in those areas, but that the service quality and price will be left to the free market.

California is considering similar legislation. Ohio, Michigan and Kentucky have passed laws allowing telephone companies to stop offering traditional phone service and are now determining how to implement them, Lichtenberg said.

The bill signed last week by Maine Republican Gov. Paul LePage gives the state’s largest telephone company, FairPoint Communications, a “level playing field” in the most competitive areas of the state and maintains consumer protection in areas where choices are fewer, said Mike Reed, president of FairPoint Maine, which has struggled financially since buying Verizon’s landline business in northern New England in 2007.

“Maine has recognized the tensions the entire country faces,” Reed said.

Consumer groups that fought the bill argued it would allow FairPoint to abandon customers who still use their landline phones because they prefer the call quality and reliability.

The senior advocacy group AARP, which led the opposition, later agreed not to fight the bill after lawmakers added consumer protections that made it harder for the company to abandon service.