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Wireless Providers to Pay Universal Service Fees?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the wireless-but-not-taxless dept.

andyo writes "Mailing lists are abuzz with the news that wireless Internet providers may have to pay fees to support plain old telephone service. My own perspective is at the O'Reilly Network." The Universal Service Fees are taxes set up long ago to assure that telephone service was provided to everyone, even people who it would normally be uneconomical to serve. The theory is a good one, the execution maybe not. (Maybe if the fees went towards Universal Broadband?)

2 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Universal broadband better? by NanoGator · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I was reading the other day that during disasters email tends to work a lot better than the phone. In Bellevue Washington, they're talking about deploying wireless devices to disaster workers. Here's the article:

    http://www.komotv.com/news/story_m.asp?ID=17879

    I can't help but think that this would be a better service to keep running than POTS with the money. Text messages are so much easier to get through than voice.

    --
    "Derp de derp."
  2. This if Fed's method of gaining control.... by Dr_Marvin_Monroe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't think it's too much about the money that would be raised, since most small wireless operators are not making very much (if anything, some are free).....I see this really as a way of bringing groups like "Seattle Wireless" and others under governmental control.

    By making every group subject to audits, federal fees and filings, every group can be identified and investigated as needed. That's their hook into you. Kinda like the IRS, where even if you don't make any money, you have to provide them with all of your information and "allow" them to verify it. There's no "opting-out" of the information game.

    I've thought that it was just a matter of time before the government stepped in to regulate this....John Ashcroft can't have people communicating OUTSIDE the system!....How can he get Carnivore around this "wireless thing" if he can't force everyone to fill out forms and obey our regulations?

    The RIAA & MPAA also can't have people communicating outside of ATT and AOL either, who would they sue in a distributed wireless city-net? They couldn't force anyone off the air through their DCMA takedown suits! Although, if you had to have a liscense.....they could take that!...and then force you off the air.....

    The very idea that they would try to do this on an "unregulated" band shows what their intent is. I'd look for further attempts to limit power of WAP's, force a band change (making current units illegal by "out of band") and forcing some type of identification of base-stations. I could imagine some type of system where people would have to "activate" their base-stations by logging into the manufacturer site and giving some personal information or something like that.

    The government's intent is to limit annonymous speech and communication between individuals....they can't do that if we keep jumping out of the cattle chutes that they've errected at all of the big ISP's....