Good news for low-income people in Michigan who don’t have access to a phone or are currently using a Safelink Wireless phone; Assurance Wireless is now available in your state.
As we’ve written before, Assurance Wireless is a prepaid mobile offering through the Federal Lifeline program. Assurance offers a free phone and 200 free minutes per month if you qualify for the program. The other Lifeline prepaid mobile offering (Safelink) only offers 68 free minutes per month, so Assurance is a much better deal. If you’re using Safelink, you might want to consider switching to Assurance (see below for more on this).
You may be qualified to receive this benefit if you receive any of a number of federal or state public assistance benefits. Here’s the list of benefits that qualify residents of Michigan for the Lifeline program:
Medicaid
Food Stamps/SNAP
Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)
Federal Public Housing Assistance (FPHA) or Section 8
Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP)
National School Lunch Program’s Free Lunch Program, OR
Your household income is at or below 150% of the federal poverty guidelines
(See this for more information about eligibility in Michigan or the other four states in which Assurance is offered – New York, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee).
If you’re currently using Safelink Wireless or another Lifeline-provided phone, and you want to switch to Assurance Wireless to get more free monthly minutes, we suggest you:
1. Call Assurance Wireless to start the application process and specifically ask them what you need to do to switch from another provider. Write it down! 2. Call Safelink or your current Lifeline provider, and ask them what you need to do to switch to another provider. Write it down!
We’ve called several times to try to get specific information about switching from both carriers, and we’ve received different information each time. It may be that they’ve worked this out when you call, but it’s also possible that you may not be able to keep your existing phone number and/or you may be without your phone service for a period of time while one provider cancels and the other starts up. If anyone reading this blog does the switch, please post and let us know what your experience has been. In the meantime, we’ll keep trying to get accurate information.
As we’ve written before, Safelink Wireless is providing free cell phones and free minutes to lower-income people who qualify for the federal Lifeline program. How many phones? According to data from the nonprofit that distributes federal funds to participating carriers, in September 2009, they received $23,285,172 in reimbursements for phones they’ve distributed. Assuming the maximum per-customer contribution is $10/customer, that means there are about 2.3 million people in the U.S. who are taking advantage of this option. This is a huge number, about 27% of the $87 million distributed via the Lifeline program in that month. (See the table below for state-by-state data).
A lot of people have posted about their experiences with Safelink, but here’s a formal, open question for everyone who has a Safelink phone or has tried to get a phone from them: how do you like Safelink? Is it working for you? Was it easy to get? Have you had any problems with the phone or service? Do you find that you’re routinely buying more minutes from Tracfone (Safelink’s parent) when you run out of the free minutes?
Not a scientific sampling, but it would help to know what your experiences are as we think about recommendations to Community Voice Mail clients about these services. Please post your thoughts in the comments. Thanks!
Assurance Wireless: New Free LifeLine Mobile Phone
Posted December 17, 2009 by stokeadmin
On December 9, Virgin Mobile launched Assurance Wireless, a free mobile phone program for low-income people who are eligible under the Federal LifeLine program. It’s currently available in New York, N. Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, and likely coming to more states in the future. This service now competes with SafeLink Wireless, which has been offering a free prepaid mobile phone and monthly minutes through the federal LifeLine program for over a year. (Read our initial review of SafeLink here).
If you live in one of these states and are eligible for LifeLine (see below), you should definitely look into this. You get a free mobile phone, plus 200 free minutes each month for as long as you’re eligible for the program. This is nearly three times the minutes offered by SafeLink in these states, and a bit closer to the number of minutes someone can rely upon for normal daily use. The service is very similar to SafeLink in that your free minutes are automatically added to your phone each month. Text messages consume $.15 per message (sent or received). You can also purchase additional Virgin Mobile service to give you access to email and the Internet (cost is dependent on how much you use).
If you are currently using SafeLink and want to switch, it appears this is possible. According to Assurance Wireless, you just need to cancel your service with SafeLink and then go through the application process with Assurance. I know that the FCC is very cautious about letting people receive more than one LifeLine benefit (in this case, more than one phone per household), so it may prove to be more complicated than this or there may be a time delay as your transfer service. If you call, make sure you get confirmation about the process to ensure that you aren’t without phone service for any length of time.
A couple other things that appear better than SafeLink:
You get to talk to a human. To apply for Assurance Wireless, you need to call a toll-free number (1-888-898-4888) and talk with an operator who will answer your questions about the program and send you an application in the mail (unfortunately not by email or fax). It’s nice to be able to get a human on the phone instead of just dealing with recorded messages. Oh, and I was told today by an Assurance operator that I do not consume my free minutes when I call their toll-free customer service line using my Assurance phone. SafeLink explicitly says that when you call customer service or tech support using your phone, you consume minutes. (I always found this pretty ridiculous).
If you already have a Virgin Mobile phone, you can use it as your Assurance Wireless phone. This is nice for people already using Virgin’s prepaid service, and a smart move by Assurance Wireless as it will cut down on the number of free phones they need to send out to customers.
One thing I don’t like as much:
The site says that if you run out of minutes, you can buy additional minutes at a rate of $.20/minute via the Virgin Mobile “Top Up” cards available at retail locations everywhere. Virgin Mobile minutes normally cost $.10/minute or less at the retail stores, however, so this didn’t add up. During my talk with Assurance Wireless today, I was told that you have to buy Assurance Wireless minute cards, not Virgin Mobile minute cards. I can’t believe that’s true, and I’ll post again if I get to the bottom of this.
To qualify for LifeLine and be eligible for Assurance Wireless (or SafeLink Wireless), you need to be receiving one of a number of federal assistance benefits (food stamps, public housing assistance, home energy assistance, school free lunch program, medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, as well as select state programs), or your total household income must be below 135% of the Federal poverty level. Each state has slightly different requirements, and you need to talk with Assurance about the specifics.
So, competition between carriers has generated a better offering for low-income people who want to get a mobile phone. More minutes would be even better, but for now, it’s nice to know that the system sometimes works to the advantage of people living in poverty. Someday, a smart carrier will realize that there is a viable market at the “bottom of the (American) pyramid,” and we’ll see an even better option. And Smart Carrier, if you’re reading this, contact us. We’d like to help…
(If you have any experience, good or bad, with Assurance Wireless, please considering posting in the comments!)
The current Star Trek film (which I want to see) reportedly cost $150 million to make. But what can you do with a mobile phone camera and $57 dollars? Make a beautiful 3.5 minute film about homelessness. “Mankind Is No Island” is a short film by Jason van Genderen that uses street signs and images of homeless people in Sydney and New York City to tell the story. In 2008, the film won two awards at Tropfest New York, the USA version of the world’s largest short film festival. Definitely worth watching. And another way mobile phones can be powerful tools to combat homelessness.
Update: SafeLink now has a competitor, and they’re offering a better deal. See our post about Assurance Wireless.
Running the numbers on the SafeLink Wireless offer for qualifying low-income people, it turns out that this program is a truly good deal if you only use the free minutes and don’t buy any additional minutes through the SafeLink (TracFone) retail channel. If you plan to talk beyond the minutes offered for free, and you don’t include cost of the inexpensive phones you get through this program, you can find cheaper service elsewhere. Here’s the analysis:
In most states where SafeLink is offered, you get a free phone and 68 minutes of free talk time a month (80 in Massachusetts). So far so good. Free is great. If you only use these free 68 minutes a month, there is no cheaper program (unless someone knows of a company that pays you to use a mobile?).
If, however, you plan to talk even one more minute beyond these 68, the resulting per-minute cost is higher than you pay with other providers. SafeLink Wireless is part of TracFone, and from the SafeLink web site, when you purchase additional minutes beyond the free ones, you buy a TracFone card. The cheapest TracFone card right buys 60 minutes for $20, or $.33/minute.
68 free minutes + 60 paid minutes = 128 minutes
Total Cost paid (additional minutes) = $20
128 minutes / $20 = ~$.16/minute
$.16/minute isn’t exactly the lowest price in the prepaid mobile world. Virgin Mobile’s lowest-cost minute card gets you 200 minutes for $20 ($.10/minute), and if you buy in higher denominations, you get an even cheaper per-minute rate. Net10, which is another TracFone-owned company, charges a flat rate of $.10/minute for all their card denominations. So, on a per-minute basis, the SafeLink Wireless deal is not the best for lower-income people who plan to use more than the free minutes provided.
There are two main caveats to this. First, SafeLink provides a free phone along with the minutes. I made a call to SafeLink last week, and was told that the phones available through this program are the Motorola W175 and C139 models. Both phones were available on the TracFone web site last week for $9.99. So, while a free phone is great, it’s only a savings of $10 or so. This gets eaten up pretty quickly by the $.16/minute rate. Second (and more importantly), the additional (TracFone) minutes you add to the SafeLink phone don’t expire for 90 days, vs. 30 days for Net10 minutes. In other words, you get to keep you minutes for 60 days longer, which is a good thing for people who don’t always have funds to actively replenish their phones.
There are other reasons why the SafeLink Wireless program may not work for many low-income people. The biggest is the requirement that you have a home mailing address, and only one person at that address can receive the subsidy. If you’re living in a shelter, a group home, your car, or on the streets, you can’t take advantage of this even if you otherwise qualify. Sounds like the FCC made SafeLink adopt the policies of the LifeLine program, which was designed with landlines in mind. Hopefully, that will change.
Community Voice Mail clients and others who are thinking about this program should think hard about how many minutes they plan to use each month. More than 68? Look at the alternatives.
(I’ve been trying to talk with someone at SafeLink Wireless and TracFone for months, but am finding their web site and customer service processes almost impenetrable. If anyone from TracFone would like to refute this analysis, I’m all ears!).
Good news for low-income people in Michigan who don’t have access to a phone or are currently using a Safelink Wireless phone; Assurance Wireless is now available in your state.
