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VoIP Providers Must Contribute To Universal Access Fund |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Thursday, 22 June 2006 |
It's not about to defend VoIP providers against their
traffic being relegated into the slow lane by incumbent cable broadband
providers, so it's little surprise to hear that the FCC has now mandated that
VoIP service providers will now be forced to contribute to the US Universal Service
Fund.
In a system mimicked in Australia by the Universal Service
Obligation (USO) the American USF (Universal Service Fund) requires fixed and
mobile phone operators to subsidise the provision of telecommunications access
in sparsely populated and remote areas where it would otherwise not be economically
viable to provide the services.
So far VoIP service providers have avoided this tax, but now
the US Federal Communications Commission has ruled they must pay.
Although it is likely service providers will pass on the
additional costs to end users, the change could be offset by recent changes which saw the
removal of a Federal Excise Tax previously applied to long distance calls.
Under the new rules, the contribution may be calculated on a
percentage of revenue or on a closers examination of actually interstate
traffic as the fund applies to that traffic only. As a raw percentage the USF
assumes 64.5 percent of traffic is interstate - some providers may find their
actual interstate traffic is less than this and could base their contribution on
the lower figure.
The National Cable & Telecommunications Association, a
group representing cable operators welcomed the decision.
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