[Asterisk-biz] VoipJet's Terms of Service

[Kevin P. Fleming]

Kanuri, Seshu (Company IT) wrote:

> What is the difference? You can carry your Mobile Phone anywhere in the
> country, like many of us do and the taxes are billed as per the address
> on the bill.

Actually, they are not. They are billed as per the "service address" on 
the bill, which might not be the same as the "billing address". That's a 
minor point, though.

The difference is that if you carry your mobile phone to Texas and use 
it to make or receive calls, the wireless carrier knows with absolute 
certainty that you were in Texas. If they chose to do so, they could 
apply taxes based on the location the calls were made from/to, not the 
billing address. If the taxing authorities in Texas chose to implement 
their laws in such a way that the wireless carrier was _obligated_ to 
charge Texas taxes on calls that had at least one leg in Texas, they 
would have no choice but to do so, because they _do_ know where the 
phone was when the call occurred.

In VOIP-land, we don't know where the phone is. In fact, there could be 
multiple phones, in different states, all using the same VOIP service 
account at the same time. At _best_ we can charge taxes based on the 
billing address, or some "service address" that we ask the customer to 
provide us, so we do.