We’ve talked about the facilitations foreseen by the law to buy computers and other technological apparels already. But maybe you don’t know that there are facilitations dedicated to disabled people for landline and mobile phone rates and to surf the Internet as well. A deliberation issued by the Authority for Communications on October 3rd 2007 defines convenient rates and discounts for the telephony users with a sensory (visual or auditory) disability and for the families including member with these disabilities. A recent update further extends these facilitations.
landline telephony
Here you have the facilitations for disabled users for their home telephone line (Internet included).
- 50% discount on the monthly rate for elderly, disabled people and users with “special social needs” and for all the offer packages including Internet traffic– To benefit from it, the family must include an “over-75” or disabled member, or someone receiving a social pension or an unemployed head of the family. Moreover, the total family “ISEE” mustn’t exceed 6713,93 €.
- Total exemption from paying the monthly rate for deaf people – Reserved to people holding the deaf certificate (Law 381/1970) and eligible for the communication allowance, if owners of the subscription, or to the subscriber living with the deaf person. To benefit from it, you must present the “family status certificate” (even self-certifiable), together with the medical certificate of the deafness and eligibility for the communication allowance.
- Facilitations for blind people – Telephone operators must recognize 90 hours per month of free Internet traffic from home, in case of consumption-based rates, or a 50% discount on the monthly rate, in case of “flat” subscriptions. The facilitations, previously reserved to totally blind people only, have been recently extended to partially blind people too, presenting the appropriate certificates. As for the facilitations for deaf people, in this case you can benefit from them also when the subscription is owned by someone living with the blind person.
mobile telephony
- Exemption from paying the license tax, usually owed for mobile telephony subscriptions.
- Offer package dedicated to deaf or (totally or partially) blind users– This rate must include an appropriate amount of data traffic for an affordable price, not exceeding 50% of the best price for all the offer packages including the same amount of data traffic.
- For deaf users – The law foresees at least 20 Gb of data traffic, in addition to at least 50 free SMS per day.
- For visually impaired users – The law foresees an offer including 2000 minutes of free voice traffic and at least 10 Gb of data traffic.
Telephone companies will have to make these favoured rates available by 120 days since the January 2017 Agcom deliberation entered into force. In the meantime, the existing facilitations foreseen by each operator for disabled users remain valid. For more information, please refer to the website of each operator.
But it’s clear that a huge portion of users with disability is still out of those facilitations. For those people, telephone (most of all the mobile one) is an essential tool for social and work inclusion. When will there be fares for motoric disabled people too?