Taxes and surcharges over 36% of bill, is this normal? [Telecom]

In Australia there is a 10% GST (on all goods and service), and the telcos have to contribute to a pooled fund to subsidise services in remote areas, but that is built into their charges and is not a separate tax.

Yes, it is typical.

Some of the taxes are for social purposes, such as deaf people communication, low-income people communications, and public safety. Other fees are actually merely part of the rates you pay for service, falsely disguised as a special fee rather than a part of the service cost.

IMHO, this is all an unfortunate, but predicted result of Bell System divesture 25 years ago. Basically, the biggest users of communications got a price break at the expense of small users.

I use AT&T for my wire-line telephone service in Nevada. My surcharges and other fees are: Federal Subscriber Line Charge 5.14 Federal Universal Service Fee 1.59 Carrier Cost recovery Fee (Long Dist) 1.99 Total 8.72 My bill for local and unlimited long distance is 51.00 (which includes many custom calling features) before the above fees. So the tax+fee rate is 8.72/51.00 = 17%. There is no tax listed, so apparently communiations services are not taxed in Nevada. (That's good, because our sales tax rate is about

I get Internet (but not cable TV) from the local cable TV company. The bill lists CALEA fee of 0.42, but no other fees or taxes. I believe that CALEA stands for "Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act", so the fee is to reimburse the cable company for complying with this law. Hmm, this means that I'm paying a fee for the government to spy on me.

Unfortunately, yes.

Not to hijack the discussion, but I'm going to switch to taxes and fees on cell phones (I realize we're discussing landlines). We have been with all of the Big Four cell providers in the past 10 years and our monthly bills have always shocked us because they're nowhere close to the fees promised when we purchased the plan.

Texas charges roughly a 21% tax on cell phones. Add to this per phone charges for various local, state, and federal mandates, local taxes, and federal taxes and you're suddenly looking at a huge bill.

I don't have a bill in front of me (I held off responding to this because I wanted one in front of me, but won't have a new bill for a couple of weeks). If I'm not mistaken there's a $5.95 per line charge. So when we add another phone for $10, right off the bat it's $15.95. Plus other other smaller fees I missed, 80 cents here, a dollar there. And the added fee for unlimited texting for the kids. And the previously mentioned taxes. Wow.

I don't know this is true. But I'm guessing once upon a time cell phones were looked upon as being luxury and business items, so states taxed them heavily. As time went on everyone got a cell phone, but states enjoyed the revenue stream and never dropped the taxes.

John

My Vonage $24.99 becomes $31.99 due to the following:

Regulatory Recovery Fee $0.99 Emergency 911 Cost Recovery $0.99 Sales Tax $2.01 Federal Program Fee $1.75 State 911 Fee $1.00 State Telecom Education Access Fund $0.26

Only $7 in taxes and fees. Of that, the Regulatory Recovery Fee, Emergency 911 Cost Recovery Fee, and Federal Program Fee are all money grabs by Vonage. $3.73 or more than half that $7.

Don't even ask about my $39.99 T-Mobile plan. It ends up at $50 a month with the same baloney.

The City of Riverside, Calif. tried to add a tax to Cellular phone about 18 years ago; they had a meeting on it and over 500 peopke showed up to protest, most of them made it very very clear that they never even used their phone in the city, just lived here or had a Riverside billing address. Things are very different now since almost all plans come with huge amount of minutes. I myself still only use mine for work and that is out of the area; they are now going to try it again and I expect there will be again a protest, but I'm sure that it will get passed this time since the elected officials still think we work for them and they have to stuff their pockets with our cash so they can drive their city owned Hummers and the like.

Manitoba chiefs want cellphone revenue

Manitoba First Nations are seeking compensation from Manitoba Telecom Services for every cellphone signal that passes through First Nations land, saying the airspace should be considered a resource like land and water.

Tony