T-Mobile South, LLC, and Powertel Memphis, Inc. v. Leslie Bonet

Summary

The court affirmed the judgment requiring T-Mobile to impose and remit Alabama’s emergency 911 service charge for prepaid wireless connections. It held that both the earlier and later versions of the statute covered prepaid customers, that the charge was a service fee rather than a tax, that the statutory scheme did not violate the Commerce Clause, and that T-Mobile’s average-revenue-per-user method did not comply with the statute. The court treated T-Mobile’s failure to obtain primary-use information as a business decision that did not excuse statutory compliance.