Phoney Baloney Phone Charges
Did you know that as a customer of one of the BIG phone companies, you pay BIG bucks in phoney baloney charges. Here are a couple of examples, which I am sure that after reading you will agree they are not just "peanuts".
Subscriber Line Charge - aka FCC Charge for Network Access aka Federal Line Cost Charge. Way back in the mid 1980s the local telephone companies were allowed to charge this fee - which can be as much as $6.00 per line per month - to compensate the local telephone companies for long distance companies accessing their local lines. Note the use of the word allowed - it is not a mandatory charge, it is totally discretionary. Back when this charge was first proposed, the local telephone companies, Verizon and SBC are the largest left today, did not offer long distance, so this charge made at least some sense. Now, however, Verizon and SBC offer long distance services, and once the ATT merger with SBC is complete and the MCI merger with Verizon is complete, these two companies will probably control over 50% of the long distance market. Their market share will surely continue to increase. Whose pockets is this subsidy going into? Why SBC and Verizon's, that's whose. These two companies make BILLIONS every year, a nice chunk of which is provided by the many tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of lines they own, multiplied by $6 dollars.
Local Number Portability Charge. The FCC required the telephone companies to make numbers portable, so you and I could switch carriers and keep our original phone numbers. The big phone companies successfully lobbied the FCC to allow them to tack on a charge to everyone's phone bill to compensate them for implementing software to make number portability a reality. Due to the lobbying efforts of the big telephone companies, there is little meaningful telephone competition, so you are paying $.30 to $.40 per phone number per month basically for nothing. If a phone number is truly yours, why should you have to pay for it for years and years.
Why do these big telephone companies continue to bill you for these phoney baloney charges? Because they can. There is no meaningful local competition, and thus no market force out there forcing them to get rational about what they charge you. As monopolists have always done, they will charge as much as they can get away with.
What can all of you in the peanut gallery do? Look at the new internet-based phone companies like Vonage. If you have a high speed cable connection you can add phone service for about $25 per month. That's less than you are paying today, and there won't be any phoney baloney charges artificially increasing your monthly costs.
Now, just don't get me started about the myriad taxes you pay on your phone bill!
Subscriber Line Charge - aka FCC Charge for Network Access aka Federal Line Cost Charge. Way back in the mid 1980s the local telephone companies were allowed to charge this fee - which can be as much as $6.00 per line per month - to compensate the local telephone companies for long distance companies accessing their local lines. Note the use of the word allowed - it is not a mandatory charge, it is totally discretionary. Back when this charge was first proposed, the local telephone companies, Verizon and SBC are the largest left today, did not offer long distance, so this charge made at least some sense. Now, however, Verizon and SBC offer long distance services, and once the ATT merger with SBC is complete and the MCI merger with Verizon is complete, these two companies will probably control over 50% of the long distance market. Their market share will surely continue to increase. Whose pockets is this subsidy going into? Why SBC and Verizon's, that's whose. These two companies make BILLIONS every year, a nice chunk of which is provided by the many tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of lines they own, multiplied by $6 dollars.
Local Number Portability Charge. The FCC required the telephone companies to make numbers portable, so you and I could switch carriers and keep our original phone numbers. The big phone companies successfully lobbied the FCC to allow them to tack on a charge to everyone's phone bill to compensate them for implementing software to make number portability a reality. Due to the lobbying efforts of the big telephone companies, there is little meaningful telephone competition, so you are paying $.30 to $.40 per phone number per month basically for nothing. If a phone number is truly yours, why should you have to pay for it for years and years.
Why do these big telephone companies continue to bill you for these phoney baloney charges? Because they can. There is no meaningful local competition, and thus no market force out there forcing them to get rational about what they charge you. As monopolists have always done, they will charge as much as they can get away with.
What can all of you in the peanut gallery do? Look at the new internet-based phone companies like Vonage. If you have a high speed cable connection you can add phone service for about $25 per month. That's less than you are paying today, and there won't be any phoney baloney charges artificially increasing your monthly costs.
Now, just don't get me started about the myriad taxes you pay on your phone bill!
posted by slates at 10:09 AM
1 Comments:
We are exceptionally close to getting rid of our traditional land-line completely. It's not worth it for what we pay. We make all our long distance phone calls on our cell phones. I think the time is coming when more of us are going to say sayonara to the traditional telephone providers.
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