Verizon, AT&T Gunning For USF Funds? > Wha? Who? Where?

Wha? Who? Where?

The USF is stupid. It's corporate and consumer welfare. It's fairly dumb no matter who gets it and should be abolished. Actually, I see more people who like to seize any reason to bash Verizon and AT&T, without particular consistency themselves. I do support Verizon and AT&T on other issues, because I am in favor of deregulation and against corporate welfare, no matter what the guise. And guess what? Plenty of companies argue for corporate welfare for themselves, and regulation when it helps themselves, and deregulation and eliminating corporate welfare for others when it helps themselves. People who boil it down to "Company X is evil/good" are fooling themselves. All companies are after profits and after edges. Deregulation, including reducing the USF, is one way to reduce gaming the system.

I imagine that part of the reason that AT&T is clamoring for "reform" of this is because of the recent issue with termination fees paid to tiny rural telcos in Iowa, who then rerouted phone calls over VoIP networks internationally, making a profit from the regulated prices that AT&T had to pay them.

You know, those blatantly taking advantage of regulation free international call Iowa scams. The call termination fee subsidy for rural telcos and customers is bearable when there are only a few calls to those remote locations, as in normal usage. The free international call companies took advantage of the regulation, and made it way too expensive. So I see the AT&T point there in wanting to change the regulatory structure.

OTOH, I think that AT&T's lawsuit claiming that those calls "aren't really terminated" is a really dangerous and bad argument that could cripple legitimate VoIP uses. There is perfectly legitimate arbitrage out there that can benefit consumers. In order to preserve the transformational power of VoIP, the correct thing is to reform these termination fees and reduce or eliminate the USF.

I will say that I believe that the study said up to $13,365/year for the worst cases, and the original post is on average.

Apologies for top posting in advance..

ATT is hardly immune from playing that game themselves.

If I recall correctly, there was a case where ATT was routing all of their calling card calls to a central location and calling those calls "information services" because they were forcing customers to listen to some sort of ad (maybe in the last two years?).

In either case, whatever the iowa company thing is and the att thing was, neither have anything to do with usf. It's quite a complex issue actually and customers like my grandparent's really don't care...what's the bill look like?

Pass-through USF fees are an interesting venture into market based pricing. When USF goes away, do you believe the pass-through fees won't become a component of the price?
The only reason pass-through fees are acceptable is due to lack of competition or overall pricing of DSL, for example, that is less than the alternatives (cable).

As I said, it's too complicated for a few lines, but you sound like a telco person with T or VZ. Too bad you weren't hanging around with the ISPs back in the late 90's when they were complaining about the special access and line cost fees from T and VZ. Most notably...we have little left of an ISP market as customers, highest cost of business was the telco before the telcos were even interested in internet access as a business.