For analog phone service, there must be a physical pair of wires running from the nearest switch to your house. As you can imagine, this can be expensive to mai

For analog phone service, there must be a physical pair of wires running from the nearest switch to your house. As you can imagine, this can be expensive to maintain. Because more and more households are simply going without landlines, it no longer makes economic sense to have as many pairs going out as houses, and so providers want the ability to reassign wiring to houses that actually have service connected (this can be done at a local cabinet, in many areas you will see these by the street from time to time). So the reasons that some houses may no longer have even 911 service is because their physical wiring has been disconnected. This requires sending out a technician, so it's only done if there's a reason, usually that another house's line has failed and they want to use the known good one for that house. It's not the providers being evil - it's them not wanting to have to maintain a huge amount of physical infrastructure for subscribers that don't exist and, per the trend, will never exist again.