Sun. Sep 17, 2006
Earthlink, Come In From The Rain
You might recall me whining about Earthlink overcharging me by a factor of 100 for something called “USF Fee Recovery.” Thus, I read the following with interest last month:
Under pressure from the Federal Communications Commission, BellSouth said Friday that it will stop collecting a $2.97 per month regulatory fee from its high-speed Internet customers.
The company made the announcement after learning the FCC had begun investigating whether the carrier and Verizon Communications were violating federal truth-in-billing laws.
At issue is the Universal Service Fund, a fee the government imposes on carriers to subsidize communications services in rural and low-income areas. Carriers pass the charge along to customers and usually itemize it on their bills.
The FCC decided last year that carriers would no longer be required to collect the fee for high-speed digital subscriber line (DSL) service starting Aug. 14, 2006.
AJC: “BellSouth drops DSL fee amid feds’ probe”
It appears that BellSouth and Verizon tried to get away with charging for a USF Fee that no longer existed. Multiply $2.97 times a few million customers, and that’s a nice little monthly income boost … for nothing. So I was quite interested to see my next invoice from Earthlink. I don’t know if the USF Fee is a “hand me down” item from BellSouth (my actual copper wire provider), or if it goes in Earthlink’s pocket. Either way, you would think that after the near spanking from the FCC, they’d make sure it wasn’t passed on to Earthlink customers in their September bill.
But you would be wrong:
09/01/06 Sep 1-Sep 30: DSL Telecom Svc 22.00
09/01/06 Sep 1-Sep 30: Internet Access 17.95
09/01/06 USF Fee Recovery .85
It’s only eighty five cents to me. But like I said, multiply it by a seven figure customer base, and that’s a nice monthly income boost. For somebody.
Published 02:54PM, Sun, Sep 17 2006
Category: Internet Business
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Peanut Gallery
And that’ll teach me to delete the cookie to reset my name. Sorry about that.
I think you lost your math with that cookie as well … Anthony.
It appears to me from the report you link that they had 1,810,000 broadband customers in 2nd Q 2006. Average revunue per broadband user is $27.24. That’s per month.
1,767,000 times .85 is $1,538,500 … per month. And if $27.24 is the average revenue, adding .85 increases the average revenue per customer each month by 3%.
Not bad, for doing nothing.
(Hopefully this won’t show up twice. I’m using IE 7 now, since my first post in Firefox didn’t show up. I’m using the beta 2 version of Firefox, so it may be causing weirdness with forms. At any rate, the on-topic part of the post:)
At least you know by how much you’re getting ripped off. My Comcast bill (for internet, tv and home phone) just has a lump sum listing: Taxes, surcharges and fees: $8.44. It’s even worse on the bill summary on the website. The “taxes, surcharges and fees� weren’t listed, but they had me down for $2.11 in 6 international calls to Spain and Norway. We don’t know anyone in Spain or Norway, unless the Critter is making porn calls, but they averaged less than a minute or two each. I called Support and they said, “must be some kind of glitch on the website, man, we don’t have you down for any international calls here.�
Bottom line, I would say, nitpicky obscure tiny bill add-ons that people don’t understand or bother to contest are making some folks a very tidy profit.
Richard, I think the system was making you do penance for running IE7. You expected less from this site?
Actually, I think you used some magic combination of words that suggested you were a spammer.
You’re right, I failed to scroll down a bit further.
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According to their last quarterly report, they had 1.81 million broadband subscribers. If all of them were charged a USF Recovery fee of .85 cents, then they made $1,538,500 during the recent quarter from that charge. Divide it by three and that’s roughly $512,833 per month.