Rural Phone Rates

 Rural telephone companies need to adjust their rates closer to the statewide average if they are to continue to receive funding designed to equalize rates between customers in urban areas and those in rural areas.

Eight rural telephone companies serving customers in Idaho have been eligible to receive money from the state Universal Service Fund. The fund recognizes the higher costs to serve in rural areas where communications equipment must stretch over longer areas to serve fewer customers. The USF was designed to make phone service affordable and available to all, at comparable rates, by disbursing monies to rural telephone companies from the fund. Here’s Idaho Public Utilities Commission Public Information Officer Gene Fadness: “To prevent rural customers from having to pay exorbitantly higher prices for basic telephone service, there’s been in place the Universal Service Fund. Every telephone customer has a charge about 10 cents in Idaho per residential line and 17 cents on a business line and so they pay into this fund and it makes it so that phone service in rural areas is not quite as expensive.”

So producers, us city folks are trying to help out a little bit.