Your cell-phone plan supposedly costs $39.99 a month, say, yet your cell-phone bill usually runs to $52 or so. Here's a quick rundown of the reasons and some remedies.

Many of the major extras are beyond your control, at least as a subscriber. The biggest bite is from state and local sales taxes. Your telecom bills are typically taxed by those jurisdictions at the same rate as other goods and services, and those rates, to say the least, show no signs of going down. (There used to be a 3-percent federal excise tax—in place since 1898 to pay for the Spanish-American war—but it was repealed in 2005.) There's also a state fee for e-911, the location-based technology that helps emergency responders find you when you dial 911 from your cell phone; you may also have to pay a separate 911 fee to your municipality for having access to those emergency responders.

Carriers also tack an assortment of administrative and regulatory surcharges onto bills to defray the costs they incur when they interface with other networks in the course of providing service, as well as other incidentals. One such fee that's attracted attention lately is one, amounting to a dollar or two a month, that reflects the carriers passing along to consumers their contributions to what's known as the Universal Service Fund, which subsidizes phone carriers operating in remote or sparsely populated areas. With more than $7 billion now in the Fund, the Federal Communications Commission has just capped a portion of it. (If you have Adobe Acrobat Reader software installed, you can see the FCC's press release on the cap on Universal Service here.) But the cap's impact on consumer fees is unclear, since the Fund still requires replenishment to remain at its current level.

But some extras that are swelling your bills are well within your control. Here's a rundown of some, and how to quell them: