How Long Is A Lifetime?

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The claim of lifetime validity is being looked into by TRAI. How can a service provider promise to provide a service beyond its license period, and just what happens if the service provider decides to sell out to another?

The human life lost its sanctity a long time ago. Slavery and abuse did not start with the new year.

But the term and concept of lifetime had always been more or less sacrosanct. There was hardly any doubt with anybody what a lifetime meant. It meant the duration of a whole life. Along with that was also a clear understanding that besides God, nothing will last you a lifetime.

The other clearly understood term was free. It meant FREE...don't pay.

The telecom operators are trying to redefine these last few safe havens of tranquility. They are offering schemes for a lifetime, and they are also claiming that these will be free. The last time someone tried to redefine well-established norms of the society, there was a revolution, for good or for bad.

Is the Next Big Thing on?
The claim of lifetime validity is being looked into by TRAI, through a consultation process. As pointed out in the TRAI consultation paper, what is the future of these schemes? How can a service provider promise to provide a service beyond its license period, and just what happens if the service provider decides to sell out to another? Would the other operator be bound to honor the lifetime offer? And, just whose lifetime are we talking about? The user's lifetime or the operator's lifetime? Questions remain and this is not the first time that they have been raised.

Veterans of dialup Internet services would remember the lifetime offer from MantraOnline. Without warning, the users were asked to cough up money and buy a new subscription to extend the 'lifetime'.

Today, hardly anybody remembers the company and fewer still remember its lifetime offer. Will history repeat itself all over again? If it does, are all the providers of free lifetime also headed for a very short lifetime too?

It Has to End
And these schemes are obviously not free. First, the subscriber has to buy a membership into the 'free' club and then keep paying a regular fee to keep receiving the free calls.

If that is free, there is an urgent need for a revolution-teachers of the world arise, your country needs education in basic vocabulary.

However, it remains to be seen how many people will switch to these free lifetime schemes. And it is just one part of a long-running scheme. Ever since the beginning, all sorts of schemes have found takers. For lack of better words, we have to resort to the phrase, 'A sucker is born every minute.' Vernacular renditions of this phrase would be unprintable hence, the resort to an Americanism.

Redefine QoS
Despite a whole range of quality of service parameter that a service provider has to adhere to, respecting a consumer's intelligence is still not on the agenda. The operators keep coming out with a range of complicated schemes and then, without apparent warning, these schemes are withdrawn. But none of these schemes ever promised a lifetime and they were not free. Bharti, which was the first operator to a start lifetime offer, requires subscribers to recharge at least once every six months. Otherwise connection will be permanently deactivated if either of the following events, i.e. no incoming/outgoing/recharge happens for any continuous period of six months.

It Could have been Done Better
To be fair, the service provider can still make money on these 'lifetime free' service, thanks to the calling party pays regime.

There is also a market for schemes like these, but why do the operators have to go about duping their customers? And why call these free for a lifetime, when they are not?

A lot of parents would want their children to have receive-only phones. Car owners may want their drivers to have such phones. The list of people who would want cheap receive-only phones is endless, and some may even pay a premium for it.

But by offering the masses a service that is of hardly any use to them (the phone is a two-way communicator, not an expensive FM radio), the intentions of the service providers become suspect. Is the lifetime scheme going to follow the path of schemes offered in the past?

For all you know, the very consultation that is looking into this monstrosity-of-an-insult-to-basic-intelligence could become the excuse for withdrawing these schemes.

If service providers are serious about the lifetime claim (leave alone free), they should preempt the consultation process and come out publicly with answers to the issue raised by the TRAI regarding the lifetime offers.

Alok Singh
aloksi@cybermdia.co.in