I’ve been catching up this week with the minute stealers debate.

As far as I can see (and the great thing about blogging is that I’ll be corrected if I’m not) the whole thing was kicked off by Andy Abramson and Om Malik midway through last year, and was reprieved last week by Markus Goebel.

The original “minute stealers” term was used to describe bulk re-sellers of minutes in the US long distance market, but has been adapted to describe the new upstarts of the voip world. It’s been used as a pejorative term, often closely linked to a another put down; “arbitrage play.” Both terms are something that the newcos have been keen to reject. The question remains as posed last week; why does nobody admit that their company is a minute stealer?

Well, we at Rebtel are minute stealers, and proud of it.

Let me explain. When you are at the leading edge of disruptive technology, it’s tempting to spend more time looking at the incumbents than your competitors. It’s also very dangerous. Where it can be useful though, is in using your opponents greatest strengths to your advantage. If you can take a suit they are strong in and make it your own, then suddenly you’re in business.

The one thing mobile operators are good at these days is bucket plans. Back in 1994 when I worked on the launch of Orange, £25 got you 60 minutes of free talk time. It was the first time that any UK operator had included something with their line rental apart from…a line. (It was also part of the reason that Vodafone filed a Malicious Falsehood claim against Orange and the agency, which went to the High Court in London. That was the first time I was cross examined in court, and I sincerely hope it’s the last. For the record, the judge dismissed the claim, and Orange lived on.)

So in 1994, £25 got you 60 minutes per month. In 2007 it gets you 225 minutes, 100 texts and unlimited evening and weekend calls to landlines, albeit with an 18 month contract. But that’s a staggering case of “Bucket Plan Inflation.” If I’ve got my numbers right, that’s 60 minutes (1994) plays a maximum of 6705 minutes and 100 texts (today), fair usage policies aside, each month.

The point about this of course is that you’re still paying the operator £25 a month, but now you are locked in for a further 6 months. Put another way, the operator has given you a whole load of stuff that doesn’t cost them anything, and you have given then six extra months at £25, or £150. Few people spend time working through the numbers like this when they are buying their phone. They just see the headlines and go for it; that’s part of the reason the mobile model hasn’t changed since 1994.

So back to Rebtel. If we are up against people whose only answer is to throw minutes at the problem, then surely creating a service that works best with those free minutes is a smart thing to do? Those 6705 free minutes are normally restricted to UK calls. With Rebtel, those calls become international.

So if you take a nominal cost of 40p a minute for an international call, and our hypothetical customer spent all their available time on the phone making international calls with Rebtel, they would be saving themselves £2,682 per month.

Now let’s look at the numbers.

Your operator thinks they have duped you by getting you to pay an extra £150 for something that costs them nothing to give you. One up to them.

You then take those free minutes and make £2,682 in international calls each month, for which your operator receives…nothing. Suddenly £150 looks like a good investment. You win!

So call us minute stealers if you like. We’re proud of it. As Hjalmar always says, better minute stealers, than money stealers.

Technorati Tags: VoIP, mVoIP, Rebtel, Minute Stealer, Free International Calls, Voice 2.0

By: admin