We’ve been a GTT customer for several years and on our latest bill we now have a “Regulatory Recovery Surcharge” of almost 10% tacked on. We only purchase IP Transit services from them, nothing else, and have never had any fees tacked on top of our contracted agreed upon amount. Has anyone else ran into this? If this is a legit “surcharge” any idea of why we were never charged for that before? I figured I’d reach out to the community on this prior to jumping to further conclusions.
-Brandon
Yupp, on my GTT IP transit bill as well.
This is how telecomm companies pad out their margins these days. You don’t even want to know the % of my bill that is just “fees” I’m paying Level3 on a wave circuit. At this point I won’t sign for service without knowing exactly what I’ll be paying in terms of fees and surcharges and such - there’s some stuff you can’t avoid on some types of circuits, but for the most part, it’s all just padding out their margins.
Take care,
Matt
GTT is rapidly losing any good will they’ve had with us over the past number of years.
Saw this on our old GTT bill first and then on our Hibernia account bill when they merge their finance dept.
Filled a dispute with GTT finance and after multiple fights, we got these surcharges removed. We ended up with a HUGE mess on our bills, charged in USD when our contracts were in CAD, double-billing, etc. We lost patience and cancelled everything.
At least, they should specify the actual amount of the charge on the contract.
Eric
Maybe this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund
https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service-fund
https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service
Kinda crappy they don’t spell it out. Well, no, I guess USF would be closer to ±18%.
USF should not apply to IP transit connectivity wherein the connection between the transit provider and the customer does not cross state lines.
They are charging it to us on a connection they deliver in Toronto Canada. I can’t imagine how the corporate sociopaths could justify charging an American recovery fee on a service delivered in Canada.
I would speculate that the reason is ever popular ‘because they can”.
James R. Cutler
James.cutler@consultant.com
PGP keys at http://pgp.mit.edu
Nope… IP transit doesn’t pay into USF generally speaking.
USF is billed as a separate line item (at least on the bills I get where it is a factor).
The “regulatory recovery fee” is a bs name telcos use to make it sound like a tax they are passing on to the government. In reality, it’s a slush fund to help pay for their lobbying efforts to get congress and various PUCs to help them screw over their customers even more.
Owen
Doubt it. They usually specify USF because they don’t get to keep that money.
The generic “Regulatory Recovery Surcharge” is money they keep. They may in some tangential way have an increased cost engineering their network to comply with government regulations but whatever it is there’s no connection to your particular bill.
Sort of like the airline “fuel surcharge” that never quite goes away when the price of fuel drops.
Regards,
Bill Herrin
Once upon a time, Brandon Wade via NANOG <nanog@nanog.org> said:
We've been a GTT customer for several years and on our latest bill we now have a "Regulatory Recovery Surcharge" of almost 10% tacked on. We only purchase IP Transit services from them, nothing else, and have never had any fees tacked on top of our contracted agreed upon amount. Has anyone else ran into this? If this is a legit "surcharge" any idea of why we were never charged for that before? I figured I'd reach out to the community on this prior to jumping to further conclusions.�
It's a "because they can" fee - consumer cable and phone companies have
been doing this for years to advertise lower prices and raise rates on
customers in a fixed-price contract. So far, there hasn't been
sufficient push-back to make it stop (and almost all of these contracts
have binding arbitration clauses, so nobody can get it to a court for a
precedent-setting decision).
Our experience with GTT was just a nightmare. All kinds of billing problems and surcharges (finance surcharge, regulatory surcharge, etc.). As soon as we finished the contract, we just stopped our business with them. Now, lawyers are taking over.
KARIM M.
Yeah similar experience here …. But we’ve had that fee for a number of years applied. Hibernia as well has been charging us for it since long ago ….
ACI – yup going downhill in a hurry ;(
I think it's because they need to...not for any legal reason, but to
increase cash flow by every penny possible. As they just spend 2.3 billion
dollars on an acquisition. Every penny they can add to a bill is an
attempt to slow the bleeding that resulting from over borrowing.
3600 employees, huge major acquisitions half a billion here - 2 billion
there, where is this money coming from? Buying sales organizations with no
network?
One has to ask is this a secretly government funded/owned business? If so,
which government? Ours?
Bob Evans
CTO/Founder
Down on the farm
Hi,
I'm not sure, if thats a stateside thing, but GTT started increasing the prices on customers that were out of contract to try and get them back into a long term contract.
For us that was the last straw, where we simply told them to take their IP transit and keep it. Cancelled all GTT connections and replaced them with a carrier, that doesn't try to screw their customer base.
Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
“Cancelled all GTT connections and replaced them
with a carrier, that doesn’t try to screw their customer base.”
Who is this magical unicorn? 
“Should not”. I hear of ISPs fighting it all of the time.
"Cancelled all GTT connections and replaced them
with a carrier, that doesn't try to screw their customer base."Who is this magical unicorn?
Replaced that circuit with NTT. So far, very pleased with that.
Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
Airwire Ltd.
There are quite a few not crappy vendors out there, regardless of my snark. NTT is definitely one of the better ones.
Unfortunately, telecommunications billing is only slightly less complex than medical billing, and there are plenty of vendors that have made those decisions to invest in more financial engineering than technical since, as has been said, they can.