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FCC levy will raise VoIP rates--or not |
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Written by Leon D. Zetekoff, NCE
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Monday, 26 June 2006 |
From FierceVoIP:
Consumers and businesses are about to pay more for their VoIP service. Or maybe they won't. It's hard to tell, which is pretty much par for the course when the FCC gets involved. You heard a couple of weeks ago that the FCC was thinking about including VoIP carriers in the Universal Service Fund, which subsidizes rural phone service and schools' Internet service. The commission voted this week to, in fact, do that. Sometime before the end of the year, VoIP carriers will have to pay what amounts to about 7 percent of their revenues to the USF. But your bill might not go up, because DSL service is becoming exempt from the USF and because the 19th-century federal excise tax on telecom is finally going away. Then there's this Zen koan: if your VoIP carrier gives you service for free, how can the FCC calculate a percentage of that revenue?
For more information about VoIP and the USF:
- read this article from CIO and this article from TMCnet.
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