Policy Papers
Wireless Technology
Wireless Services Taxes
In recent years, wireless users have become a favorite target for new state and local taxes. Today, state and local taxes and fees average about 14 percent of consumers’ cell phone bills. That’s almost double the cost of ordinary sales taxes.
Wireless overview
More than 95 percent of the U.S. population – those living in urban, suburban and rural America – are served by at least three competing carriers, and more than half live in areas served by at least five. Eight years ago there were 100 million U.S. wireless customers. Today, there are more than 270 million, and in 2008 they used more than 2.2 trillion minutes – a tenfold increase since 2000. At the same time, prices have declined precipitously. Revenue per minute has fallen 89 percent since 1994, and U.S. wireless prices are much lower than in any other industrialized county. And, while at&t and Verizon are currently the two largest wireless providers, the next two largest, Sprint and T-Mobile, have a combined 82 million customers, and the carriers that round out the top 10 have another nearly 20 million customers among them.
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