Telephone subscribers in Oklahoma City and 223 other communities throughout the state will be required to pay a two percent "line inspection fee” on the basic residential rate beginning in February. The fee has been assessed by cities for decades, but up to this point at&t has simply "eaten the cost." It now will pass the fee through to users.
Apparently at&t pays a fee to maintain the rights of way for its telephone lines in 224 of about 490 communities it serves in Oklahoma.
And that's one of the reasons VoIP-as-a-replacement-for-wired-voice will not forever escape regulation of the sort legacy voice services are subject to. There are many vested interests at the local and state level, as well as at the national level, that generate revenue from voice services. As IP-based communications begin to displace huge chunks of the services base, those interests inevitably will move to protect the revenue by pulling VoIP into the older framework.
Now, the way this gets done might change. Where a "subscriber line charge" now is assessed for each "voice line," it might someday be assessed on a "broadband access connection." The revenue won't be allowed to evaporate.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Why VoIP Won't Escape Voice Regulation
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
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2 comments:
I do hope that it changes to something you suggest in the last paragraph. The current set of regulations need to be divided into two categories - those that involve the phone line and those that involve voice service. The first group should be applied to broadband access lines and the latter to VoIP. But so far the tendency has been to lump both to be voice regulation and levy all of them to VoIP.
I suspect it will. Traditionally, some fees have been levied for reasons having to do with use of public rights of way, so the logical thing is to levy such fees on the use of telephone poles and ducts and such. Some of the other fees and taxes are related directly to "social equity" concerns like rural telephone service. That might be tougher to justify, unless "universal access" is redefined to refer to broadband rather than "voice." Video services carry a separate set of taxes and fees, though. And there are vested interests there as well.
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