System access fee

The System Access Fee is a monthly charge by most Canadian wireless carriers. The fee is usually around $6.95 (on top of your monthly plan cost and taxes) and is widely criticized as an unnecessary and unfair money grab by Canadian carriers. This charge is not something that exists in the United States and other countries with a great free market when it comes to their carriers. Canada's big three carriers: Bell, Rogers and Telus all charge this monthly system access fee on all monthly plans. Most carriers were telling their customers that the System Access Fee was due to government charges to the carriers. This turned out to be completely false and the Canadian government had to step in and advise carriers to cease this disinformation.

The System Access Fee is “the $6.95 fee that most of the carriers are charging under the guise that somehow it’s paying for the network usage at a governmental level.” FACT

According to Statistics Canada, there were 178,952 payphones across country in 1999. By 2003, the number had dropped to 159,112.

Companies separate the fee out of their regular monthly charges so they can advertise a lower plan fee.

Once they have you signed on as a customer, the carriers add the “system access fee” to your bill as a separate charge “to give the illusion that … the $6.95 fee is somehow going to some other source or some other body other than the carrier company. So it’s an easy way to kind of camouflage an overall larger price point.” All this means the carriers can advertise a lower plan fee, and then tack on the system access fee once you've signed on.

We went to the cellphone stores, minus our cameras, to check on how they explain the system access fee to consumers. “It’s like a government fee,” the Fido rep said. “It’s like taxes,” was the word at Telus. “It’s a licensing fee,” was how Bell put it. And when we called Rogers, we were told the fee is “for maintenance to towers and stuff like that, so you can get better service.”

“You know, you go and buy a car and they say its $10,000, you’d be surprised if the seller said that there’s a $1000 tire fee. “The tires are part of the car. Well you know what? The towers are part of the network, right?” Litsa talking to one of the cellphone carrier sales reps. Litsa, a producer with Marketplace, talks to one of the cellphone carrier sales reps at a store.

A second agent at a Telus store told a different story when we asked whether the fee was some sort of government charge: “Anyone that tells you it is, is lying or doesn’t understand what it is, exactly.”

Nine months ago, Industry Canada told the cellphone carriers to quit blaming the government for that system access fee. Now as a condition of their licence, they're not supposed to say the fee goes to the government at all.

Nonetheless, given our visits to the cellphone shops, it seems as though some of the carriers have a deaf ear.

"Certainly one of the challenges we have as an industry is to make sure that all of the customer contact people have the right information," says Peter Barnes of the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association.

"Of course, many customers don’t really want to get into the details," adds Barnes. "What they want to know is ‘what’s my total bill? Is it going to be $40 a month?’ They’re not really concerned about the details."

The verdict on the “system access fee”? It’s a made-up charge by the wireless companies disguised as a government fee – the only thing it accesses is your wallet.

Although there exists major discontentment among Canadians when it comes to the System Access Fee, it doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon.