Access fee
Access fee can be defined as the base monthly fee paid by dedicated server customers excluding any other fees (i.e. it excludes charges for managed services etc). For other customers access fee is the base monthly access fee for the appropriate service and excludes other fees (e.g. local loop, burstable bandwidth etc).

Access charges are fees paid to local telephone companies by residential and business customers who want their telephones connected to public long-distance network, and by long-distance carriers who want their services linked with their customers’ telephones. A long-distance call originating from a home or office must go through the local telephone company’s facilities to get out onto the public long-distance network, and, at the destination, it must pass through another local telephone company’s facilities to get through to get to the recipient’s home or office.

In effect, local telephone companies are the telecommunications equivalent of toll booths in the highway transportation system and they incur certain costs in building and maintaining the facilities needed by long-distance customers and carriers. Access charges paid by those customers and carriers represent payments for use of the telephone company facilities and to help it recover the costs of building and maintaining the local network.

There are three types of access charge: end-user, switched and special. End user charges are paid by all residential and business customers in the from of a flat monthly fee (separate from service charges) for connection or access to the long-distance network. Each home or office containing a telephone is connected to the local telephone company (and therefore to the long-distance network) via copper wires and telephone poles that make up what is called the local loop. Switched access charge, is paid to the local telephone company by such long distance carriers as AT&T, MCI, and US Sprint on a per-minutes-of-use basis every month. It represents compensation to the local telephone company of its use of its facilities in originating and terminating the carriers’ long-distance traffic. Lastly, the special access charge, applies to the telephone’s company connection to the public network of the dedicated or private local lines used by long-distance carriers and large-volume business organizations in their own network.