Want to know all about Wireless Taxes and Surcharges?
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Feature
Protecting your Wireless Rights – Popular Mechanics and Bill Police
Because our motto is “Protecting your Wireless Rights: Right Plan. Right Price. Right Result.”, we love Popular Mechanics for recently publishing an article by Alexander George, The IT Guy titled “Know your (Phone) Rights”. We are all about Protecting your Rights by Protecting and Serving our customers.
What are the issues?
- Unreasonable phone data search and seizure Rights
- “Unlimited Plans” and Throttling/Prioritizing Rights (see also one of our blogs about “Unlimited plans? Depends….”
You can see this article in Popular Mechanics November 2018
What do need to know about Unreasonable Search and Seizure
1. Our Data tied to our names in data centers is protected from unreasonable search and seizure per the Supreme Court 2014 in Riley vs. California
2. Lock your device: “when locked, the information becomes illegal unless the phone is properly unlocked” says George.
3. Encrypt your data
- Android: Android encryption is already in place for any devices S7 or later. Devices can be encrypted at direct boot or using credentialed encryption and you can find out more details here: https://developer.android.com/training/articles/direct-boot
- Apple In fact, most modern Apple devices encrypt their contents by default, with various levels of protection. But to protect against someone obtaining your data by physically stealing your device, you need to tie that encryption code that only you know. Get more details here: https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/how-encrypt-your-iphone
What do i need to know about Unlimited Phone Plan Rights?
1.Know your plan and what to do in an Emergency.
- Know if your plan is Throttled or Prioritized and at what cutoff point. Here’s a primer.
- Know your usage each month as it relates to this cutoff point
- If you are a first responder, apply for WPS: WPS provides Emergency services personnel priority access and prioritized processing in all nationwide and several regional cellular networks. Here’s more information on it: Wireless Priority Information
What else?
George states….”[It’s] 2019 and we’re still pretending that wireless communication is any less essential to life in the US than potable water or electricity”.
This means that we are so dependent on our devices that suppliers can take advantage of us and our companies by exploiting pricing, services and security because we will not stop using our technology.
Lets get smart and Protect our Wireless Rights. We can help because we are ………
…….STILL Protecting your wireless Rights: Right Plan. Right Price Right Result.
What is Verizon Cloud? Here’s the scoop.
We have seen lots of bills this past month containing incorrect Billing for Verizon Cloud.
What is Verizon Cloud?
Verizon Cloud is storage system offered by Verizon to back up and sync your contacts, photos, videos.
What’s it cost?
While Contacts-only Verizon Cloud storage is free, 1 TB of storage is $9.99 per month and 500 GB storage is $5 per month after a free one month trial.
- If you have an iPhone, you probably have iCloud backup. When you sign up for iCloud, you automatically get 5GB of free storage. If you need more space, you can upgrade to a larger storage plan.
- If you have an Android Phone, Google is offers the first 15 GB per month for free. and 1 TB of cloud storage available for just $10 per month.
We like free….so if you are savvy — we know you are!! — and have an Android or iPhone device, you can get more services for free than is offered with Verizon iCloud. Our suggestion is get it off your bill and move to your platform storage options.
What else do i need to know?
- Our customers have also been receiving weird emails about Verizon Cloud for their iPhone or Android. Here’s an example:
**It turns out that none of the employees listed in Verizon’s email even had Verizon Cloud and no data had been backed up to the Verizon Cloud. Odd, huh!
2. We have also been seeing it show up mysteriously on Customer Bills.
- If this is happening to you either a user has mistakenly click on “yes” to Verizon Cloud but it is unlikely they have stored backup data there unless you have a company policy to do so
- Contact the user: in every case we have investigated, no users have used this feature and we have been able to remove the feature and saved either the $5 or $10 per month per user.
- If we have said it once, we have said it a bazillon times, check your bill!!
Still protecting your Wireless Rights……especially for Kelly today……………………
Its Tax Time: Here’s What’s New with Wireless Taxes and What to Do About Them!
Cell Phone Taxes make up almost 19% of your Wireless Bill! So, they are not to be ignored.
- According to the Tax Foundation,” typical American households with four wireless phones paying $100 per month for wireless voice service can expect to pay about $221 per year in wireless taxes, fees, and surcharges”
- Washington, Nebraska and New York Pay the Highest Taxes while Idaho, Nevada and Oregon have the lowest rates
- 51% of US Adults are wireless only
- Wireless consumers paid an estimated $17.1 billion in taxes, fees, and government surcharges in 2017
And here’s the kicker:
High competition allows for wireless prices to fall: Average revenue per subscriber or unit (ARPU) fell significantly from $44.65 per month to $41.50 per month since 2008. However, the disproportionate tax rates do not allow subscribers to fully realize the overall price reductions because taxes, fees, and surcharges remain high.
- Since 2008, average wireless monthly bills have dropped from just under $50 per month to $41.50 per month – a 17 percent reduction – while wireless taxes have increased from 15.1 percent to 18.5 percent – a 22 percent increase.
- Many states impose a much larger tax on wireless service than the sales tax imposed on the purchase of other goods and services. Some of this highest examples include Alaska (8.8 times the normal tax rate) Nebraska (2.7 times), Pennsylvania (2.5 times). Might want to think about moving!
Here’s What To Do:
- Keep your base rates low: Bill Police recently renegotiated rates and reduced a Client’s bill by over $83,000 per month (no, that’s not a typo, that’s a bunch of green). In doing so, taxes were decreased by over $15,000 per month because taxes are figured as a percent of the billed amount: lower rates, lower base to tax as a percent, lower tax. So, the first BIG way to reduce taxes is to reduce your wireless spend. Keep monitoring those bills and continuing reductions: this will keep your taxes lower as a result.
- Watch your Device Types with Surcharges and Rates: In a recent Bill Police Audit it was determined that a significant portion of the incorrect billings were due to State Taxes and Surcharges by device type:
- Tax rates are different for different device types. In Virginia, for example, Smartphones should be charged a tax rate of 4% while Phone-only Devices should be charged a rate of 3.3%. BPI found examples of Phone-Only Devices being charged at the Smartphone Rate.
- State surcharges were charged for a smartphone but the billed device was phone-only. This was a 40% difference in rate and can add up over many devices.
So on this Tax Day, make your taxes work for you: go ride on some publicly provided roads, enjoy your local library and if you go celebrate too hard, maybe you’ll have some cool interaction with some fellow brothers and sisters in blue.
If you have questions about saving your company money through the auditing, optimizing, or managing of your wireless services, please click here to contact The Bill Police.
March Madness: Heads up for 5 Quick Ways to Curb Data Madness!
According to Fortune Magazine, we know that the average worker will spend Six Work Hours (yes, 6!) Watching March Madness
We all love to cheer on our favorite college basketball teams in March. Check out the facts below to see the stats on March Madness corporate data usage. 
Fun Facts on Corporate Device Usage During March Madness: According to AppDeveloper Magazine:
- Compared to the month prior, that the number of employee devices connecting to the websites increased 211%, while the number of devices utilizing the apps increased 126% for the sports apps of NCAA March Madness Live, ESPN, CBS Sports and Yahoo Sports. Lost productivity? perhaps………
- IMPORTANT NOTE: All this increased activity was on corporate devices
- Teachable moment? Watch for potential overages and monitor high data usage, especially this month
Indeed, one of our Clients mentioned that every year their network was brought to its knees during March Madness due to all the employee streaming.
Here’s a few thoughts on how to manage the expense:
- Set up billing alerts for high data usage in your carrier portal. Check out our blog to provide you with some details here
- Let users know to connect to Wifi Networks whenever possible, especially if streaming
- Let users know you will be monitoring their bills and checking data usage. While this doesn’t mean you need to be accused of police brutality, it does mean users should be aware of their usage and what it could be costing the company.
- Send Text Alerts to users to alert users of high usage and what they can do instead of using their wireless data network. See additional information on that here
- Educate the users: let them know if they are streaming 2 hours of a game that is approximately 1 to 1.5 GBs of usage. If their single data plan is 2GB for the entire month, they will need to reduce usage for the rest of the month in order not to exceed their own allowance. Data usage guidelines can be found here
Also, if you have questions about saving your company money through the auditing, optimizing, or managing of wireless services, please click here to contact The Bill Police.
Still Protecting Your Wireless Rights…..especially for all those college athletes this week…….