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Lifeline and Safelink, the Facts

Contrary to some things floating around there is no new federal program that is currently providing free mobile phones and there is no special “Obama” phone. If you didn’t know it before, you will now know that this is a myth that’s circulating on the internet through email and some blog sites. It’s been proven factually inaccurate many times, just one of these being through the site through this link.
It talks about the fact that the low-income homes have actually been eligible for a discounted phone serviced for over a decade and the program is actually funded by the telecom companies themselves, not through taxes and the president has zilch to do the program.

The Federal Lifeline program was actually created back during the Reagan years. It’s a federal program which was created during that administration over 25 years ago in 1984. It was further enhanced 12 years later via the Telecommunications act. This was a bipartisan act with broad support in Congress. The program is administered by the USAC (Universal Service Administrative Company) and is intended to guarantee that value telecommunication services are made available to the low-income customer and made available at just, reasonably priced and sensible rate plans. The Lifeline program supports the reduction of the low-income customer’s charges every month for their basic telephone services.
Through Safelink the scope of the program has grown to now include mobile phones. Usually the Lifeline program is only available to provide discounted services on a customer’s wired telephone line bill. The company Safelink Wireless was originally created by the company TracFone Wireless. When the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) approved for Safelink to offer Lifeline it was a bump to be able to offer mobile phone discounts to low-income customers.
What Safelink Wireless does is apply the USF (Universal Service Fund) subsidy to an allocation of free airtime minutes and then TracFone will provide the mobile device at the expense of the company. Rather than receiving a subsidized monthly bill for the Lifeline Safelink will exchange the total of the discounted service to the minutes for every month for 12 months.
The mobile phone will offer some useful features like:
•   Voicemail
•   SMS messaging
•   3-way calling
•   Caller ID
•   Call waiting
•   911
The phones through Safelink aren’t paid for either by the federal government or the taxpayers. TracFone Wireless pays for both the phones and the promotion of their Safelink service in order to make sure that those customers that are eligible will know the program is there for them.
Through Safelink Wireless they are working to make universal access to a telecommunications service a reality for all Americans. As of October of 2009 Safelink had over 2 million customers and has risen their available to 23 states.
The state availability is as follows:
•   Alabama
•   Connecticut
•   Delaware
•   Florida
•   Georgia
•   Illinois
•   Louisiana
•   Maine
•   Maryland
•   Massachusetts
•   Michigan
•   Missouri
•   North Carolina
•   New Hampshire
•   New Jersey
•   New York
•   Ohio
•   Pennsylvania
•   Tennessee
•   Texas
•   Virginia
•   West Virginia
•   Wisconsin
•   District of Columbia
There are over 1,700 companies throughout the U.S. that are providing a discounted telephone service and the extensive outreach of the Safelink promotion the largest service in the country is TracFone for Lifeline only behind AT&T.
Not everyone of course can be eligible for Safelink. There are different requirements from state to state. In order to find out whether or not you qualify you can go to the Safelink website at http://www.safelink.com or call 1-800-SAFELINK.

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Tags: Cell phone plans, cell phones for seniors

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 4:54 pm by Matt Heman and is filed under cell phones for seniors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.