What are the "fees and surcharges" on my bill?

The "Surcharges" on your Panix bill are extra fees that we charge you to recover the cost of taxes that we pay on telecommunications services we obtain to provide you service. This model of pricing surcharges separately from the "list price" of the service is very consumer-unfriendly, and we've fought it for years, but everyone else does this, and when we didn't, our prices looked wildly higher than everyone else's. So we have finally decided to quote prices the same way that everyone else in the Internet business does.

The taxes that we're recovering include sales taxes (federal, state, and local), excise taxes, the "FUSF" charge, and others. We do not mark them up, and these taxes are assessed only on the amounts we pay to our providers, NOT on the entire amount of your bill.

Customers who are billed yearly should note that the Panix yearly discounts only apply to Panix's own charges, not to these surcharges.

Tax exempt customers should note that these are taxes and fees that Panix pays and passes through to the user. Tax exempt status does not apply to these charges because Panix still has to pay those taxes.

The total of these charges (per month) on our various DSL services as of 5/1/2005 is listed below:

sDSL Surcharges Speed Taxes & Fees Passthrough 192 $18.99 384 $23.07 768 $29.84 1.1M $36.59 1.5M $42.02

aDSL Surcharges Speed Taxes & Fees Passthrough 1.5M/128 $8.67 1.5M/384 $11.39 1.5M/768 $12.21 3.0M/384 $12.75 3.0M/768 $13.84 6.0M/768 $14.92

Please note that these amounts will change whenever taxes are changed.

If you have further questions, please feel free to email the Panix Accounting Department.

FUSF stands for Federal Universal Service Fund. For more information on the FUSF, you may view the fcc.gov pages.
http://www.fcc.gov/wcb/tapd/universal_service/

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