Over the past few years, the FCC has been redesigning its Universal Service Fund. In last fall's CAF Order, new rules for dispersing the fund were laid out. We've discussed that a bit here.
Last week, the FCC adopted a new Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, this time on how the funds for USF will be collected. At present, providers of "interstate telecommunications" are taxed; the current rate is 17.3%. It's so high, in part, because the contribution base (mostly long distance calling) keeps shrinking. ISPs are not taxed. But the new Notice opens up all sorts of ways to broaden the tax base. And among those ideas, ISPs could be taxed. That's not the sole idea being put on the table, but when they declared DSL to be non-common carriage and removed it from the USF rolls, the tax rate on what was left went up significantly. So they may want to put it back on the rolls, but not in a way that hurts ILECs' (their patrons') competitive positioning. The Notice is 182 pages long and I haven't read it all yet, and I doubt too many will want to bother. But I do suggest paying attention to this one, so the WISP industry's interests are not hurt. The full notice is here: http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2012/db0430/FCC-12-46A1.pdf -- Fred R. Goldstein fred "at" interisle.net Interisle Consulting Group +1 617 795 2701 _______________________________________________ Wireless mailing list [email protected] http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
