As foreign competitors drive hard into this sector, that lifeline is being snatched away.
Over the past few weeks, 600, 000 Americans have been cut off from that lifeline.
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The FCC said it is investigating allegations that some Lifeline providers violated the rules, though it declined to comment on that probe.
But in 2004 the commission chairman warned that the AU needed the kind of financial lifeline that the US gave to post-war Europe.
And every day this goes on, another 50, 000 Americans lose that badly needed lifeline.
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It was part of a lifeline that Microsoft threw Apple during the dark days of 1997.
Now even that relatively meager lifeline is starting to look shaky.
If the investment under way means these factories too are soon only 80% utilised, Detroit will lose the lifeline that allowed it to survive the past decade.
"Slashing journalistic jobs and cutting programmes is a terrible assault on a much-loved institution that provides a lifeline to listeners around the world, " said Michelle Stanistreet, NUJ general secretary.
That is a lifeline for Hungary's energy company, MOL, which otherwise depends solely on oil from the east and is fighting attempts by a Russian company, Surgutneftegaz, to gain control.
Windows XP, released to consumers in 2001, was also granted a lifeline to ensure that it could be used on so-called netbooks - cut-down net-capable laptops that are proving very popular.
Vestas won a critical lifeline from its banks that should provide the world's largest wind turbine maker more time to sort out liquidity concerns.
But many of the names are still deep in the red from the earlier disasters, and it is to them that Mr Brown has thrown a lifeline.
Its only other lifeline is the possibility that it may secure a portion of work on 30 new British Royal Navy warships, a new generation of aircraft carriers, type 45 frigates and combatant landing craft.
He said the service was a "lifeline" for the people that use it.
When we all live in caves for global warming or whatever reason, that wire is going to be our lifeline.
UN's oil-for-food programme has stopped, along with the customs revenues that have been the two governments' lifeline, an economic crisis looms.
The fatter profit margins for SUVs are a financial lifeline to a Chinese industry that is being squeezed as global brands make inroads into their market for smaller cars.
More importantly, it's a potential lifeline for an Illini team that still has to face No. 18 Minnesota on the road Sunday and had been watching its season slip away.
China's Wanxiang Group offered A123 a lifeline in August, but Tuesday that deal fell apart.
In most office environments, and even a few homes, that Ethernet cord is a PC's lifeline to the local network, peripherals like printers, and the Internet.
One of the task force co-chairs is psychologist John Draper, project director of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a network of centers that field calls from emotionally distressed and potentially suicidal people.
"That little radio in some mountain village was a lifeline for many Afghans during these years of isolation" he said.
We had to throw a lifeline to some of the very firms that had helped cause this crisis in the first place.
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It comes back to the pricing issue and I think as Trevor outlined before the block tariff approach, the lifeline subsidies and so on is something that we probably all agree on as an approach to that.
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"In the emerging markets it's our only lifeline to the internet so hackers are finding that information more and more valuable which is why they're going after these devices, " said Khan.
In his introductory news conference last week, Idzik said he wanted to maintain a "constant influx of competition" among players and that the draft would be the team's "lifeline" to doing so.
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