Sale of Oi jeopardizes 31-year toll-free promise

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In 2002, Oi began operating in Brazil with an aggressive campaign: Chip Oi 31. The operator sold chips that allowed free calls to other cell phones of the same operator on weekends for 31 years.

“Talking for free for 31 years on the weekend was something out of this world. Few people had a mobile phone, and when you wanted to talk to someone you had to go to the pay phone”, says Marcio Maciel, a resident of Sete Lagoas (MG).

“We didn’t know it would get to this point where communication would be so accessible. We didn’t even think about having internet on the cell phone.”

Twenty years later — and 11 before the deadline — the sale of Oi to its competitors threatens to shorten the life of the promotion.

With the sale of Oi, the more than 40 million consumers who use telephony services will be transferred to a new operator in the coming months. They will be divided between Tim, Vivo and Claro.

The problem is that neither Oi nor the buyers officially assume the maintenance of the agreement.

Oi says that the promotion “will remain active as long as there is a contractual relationship with the customer”. THE sheet asked if that agreement would remain in effect after the sale, but the company did not respond.

When consulted on whether they would assume the commitment to maintain the promotion, Tim, Vivo and Claro did not comment, but according to Procon (Foundation for Consumer Protection and Defense), companies “need to maintain the conditions offered to those who have already hired”.

According to a survey by Idec (Brazilian Institute for Consumer Protection), the plans of other operators are up to five times greater than those of Oi, which worries the lawyer of the entity’s Telecommunications and Digital Rights Program, Camila Leite Contri.

“Especially because Oi has admittedly more affordable plans on the market, there should be maintenance of these prices”, he says.

The lawyer recalls that plans with discounts on calls are increasingly common since the early 2000s, when the campaign was launched, but the continuation of the offers has not yet been specified by the authorities that analyzed the purchase, Cade and Anatel.

In the case of judicialization, he explains, the response may be unfavorable to the consumer. “That’s why it would be important to have an explicit rule for this transition.”

Anatel gave 90 days from approval for operators to present a communication plan to consumers about the transition, but for now, the lack of definition makes consumers who still use the chip anxious.

One of them is electronics technician Wendell Figueiredo dos Santos, who was 19 years old when the promotion aired. In his first job and living away from home, he thought it would be nice to have a cell phone. “At the time it was one of the most attractive promotions,” he says.

To this day, he maintains the number with top-ups of R$10 every two or three months, but not to make free calls at the weekend.

“I know there are many new lines, I even have another one. Nowadays the biggest issue is data, talking on the phone has become an archaic thing. But I keep it for an emotional reason, an affective thing. It was my first phone, and I have many records on the internet with this number”, he says.

Until mid-2010, however, it still used the feature. He remembers that, when he bought it, it was a “time of lean cows”. “It was very expensive to maintain a telephone, a telephone line. I recharged and it was 11:59 pm on Friday and I was already waiting to make a call.”

Mutual friends, he says, used his conference plan — adding more than one person to the call was a big innovation.

“I felt like a call center. If someone wanted to talk to a friend of mine, they would call me and I would call them back. Then I would listen to the entire conversation.”

EXPENSIVE CALLS ENCOURAGED CUSTOMERS TO JOIN THE CHIP 31

At the time when the Oi promotion was launched, the market was one of expensive calls and communication difficulties.

“It was a fever. It was the boom in private communication”, recalls police officer Rafael da Silva Barbosa, now 35 years old. Four years before the promotion, in 1998, Telebrás was privatized. Until then, to have a line it was necessary to sign up for sweepstakes or pay the price of a popular car in the parallel market.

Rafael didn’t get the chip, but a cousin of his did and that was enough. “The fun of the weekend was Oi 31 anos”, he says. At the time, living on the same street in a neighborhood in Fortaleza, the cousins ​​would get together and randomly call numbers from the same operator, like a rudimentary social network, he recalls. “We would sit on the sidewalk, eat something and go out and call whenever we wanted.”

The tire repairman from Sete Lagoas Marcio Maciel, now 41 years old, bought his chip at the end of the promotion and sold it in 2004 for R$950 (which would be equivalent to R$2,457.65 today). “As it became very scarce, people started looking for it. It was a good deal to sell”, he says.

It was possible to buy two Nokia 3310s with the money he got, he recalls, who believes he got a good deal, but no better than a friend’s. “He traded in a 70-something Chevette,” he says. “It was a little beat up, but for those who didn’t have a car it was great.”

As long as he kept his cell phone, however, it was useful to him—he even lent it to friends who were long-distance dating. He says he didn’t imagine so many changes in 20 years. “The younger ones, if you call, they hang up and wait for you to send a message via WhatsApp.”

Wendell, who still has the chip, is waiting for a message from the operator to explain how the customers of this promotion will be.

“If there’s going to be a change, we need to be warned,” he says. “I have a 31-year contract.”

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