Rebtel On Tour February 29th, 2008  

The Rebtel Street Team at Warwick

On the 27th of February, Rebtel’s Street Team invaded the campus of beautiful Warwick University in the British midlands. They hung out with students, handed out goodies, and talked about how the current rates for calling internationally with mobile phones are burning a hole in student wallets across the globe. Even though Facebook and other online based social media tools help out a lot, they’re nothing compared to hearing your mother’s or your best friend’s voice on the phone. It’s the next best thing to actually seeing them in person.

Rebtel’s Street Team introduced the Warwick students to the best (and cheapest) way of keeping in touch with global friends and family: the Rebtel way. Our service was very nicely embraced by both international and local students. The international students were happy to find a new way to get in touch with their family back home and the domestic students were equally as happy because now they can call their newly found friends from different parts of the world conveniently from their regular mobile phones!

For more background info on how things went down at Warwick, check out our Flickr.

By: alexander drewniak

AT&T: Please stop playing games February 28th, 2008  

If you’re reading this you most probably already know that Verizon prevents its customers from sending SMS to themselves from the Rebtel web site. These SMS messages contain local U.S. phone numbers that allow Rebtel users to make low-cost or free international calls.

Verizon also prevents its customers from receiving SMS from Rebtel customers outside of the U.S.

Well, it now appears that AT&T Wireless has started playing games with SMS, targeting messages that its customers send to themselves or receive from friends using Rebtel services both from http://www.rebtel.com as well as from Rebtel’s free Facebook conference call service, Group Talk.

To avoid the indictment of blocking Rebtel SMS, it looks like AT&T has turned all SMS from Rebtel services into what’s called Flash SMS. As a result, the messages are only temporarily stored when displayed; as soon as you close the message, it disappears and is not automatically stored in the phones Inbox.

I’m told by my more technical colleges that this is no coincidence that there is a trigger value that has to be set by AT&T to make the SMS into a Flash SMS, instead of a normal message.

I know this is happening because I’m an AT&T Wireless customer and experience their nasty trick regularly when I receive Group Talk notifications for free conference calls. And, friends who are also AT&T subscribers report the same experience.

So Shame on you AT&T Wireless. This is a dirty trick right out of the Verizon playbook, and it’s time to stop.

By: alexander drewniak

Rebtel played by the rules. Now it’s Verizon’s turn. February 20th, 2008  

Welcome all Verizon and AT&T customers!

That probably sounds a bit odd coming from Rebtel these days. But yesterday Verizon and AT&T rolled out new plans that give U.S. customers unlimited airtime minutes for a flat fee of $100. And flat fee plans are music to our ears even if the carrier continues to block its customer SMS.

Unlimited airtime minutes means anyone who subscribes to one of these plans now has the ability to make unlimited free international calls to 39 countries around the world using Rebtel’s Smart Call system.

But even if they’re not willing to jump through the few hoops that make the international portion of call free, they can still take advantage of our super low-cost rates for calling any phone, anywhere in the world.

And eventually, we hope that Verizon will come to its senses and stop preventing its customers from sending standard SMS text messages to themselves and their friends if they contain local phone numbers issued by Rebtel.

Late last week I spoke with Robert Poe, a reporter for VoIP-News and DailyWireless about this issue. As any good reporter should do, Robert contacted Verizon after our call. Verizon (no surprise) denies that it is blocking SMS that their customers try to send to themselves or that their friends try to send to them from the Rebtel web site.

Robert declined Rebtel’s help to test our claims, which will make his findings all the more powerful when they come out. In the mean time, with the kind help of my comrade Fredrik Henning, I thought I’d take a minute to shed some light the mechanics of this problem and why Verizon is not telling the truth.

To be able to send SMS to people in U.S. from a system platform, not person to person, a short code number is required to identify the sender of the messages. Therefore every provider of messaging services has to apply for a dedicated or shared short code (a 5-6 digit number) from the Common Short Code Administration (CSCA), which Rebtel had done and received.

The reason for this bureaucracy is that the U.S. market applies interconnect charges differently than other countries. In the U.S. mobile recipients pay for incoming SMS. In contrast, people in Europe do not pay for incoming SMS because the operators in Europe are being paid by the originating operators to cover the cost of delivering the SMS to the recipient.

Rebtel wants its customers to be able to send SMS to their friends that are mobile subscribers in U.S. mobile networks. Rebtel wishes only to send SMS on behalf of the users, and not perform any unsolicited bulk messaging (a.k.a. SPAM or advertising).

So, despite what Verizon spokesman Jeffrey Nelson tells the press, every SMS sent from Rebtel’s system is sent on behalf of the users who have requested that Rebtel send SMS to their friends or to themselves.

But it doesn’t end here. To get a short code implemented in a U.S. mobile operators network a specification of traffic flow and commands has to be submitted to each operator for approval of the process of OPT-IN and OPT-OUT, insuring that the recipients really do wish to get charged for receiving SMS.

Rebtel provided its specification of this process and got it approved by some operators, but not all, namely, Verizon.

So the bottom line is we’ve played by the rules. Our specification follows all requirements to get a short code approved with regards to OPT-IN and OPT-OUT. Yet, Verizon refuses to approve it. What’s that about? Why is this allowed?

We think it’s now time for the industry to stand up to this bullying.

We think the CTIA the trade association “dedicated to expanding the wireless frontier needs to reprimand Verizon and demand they play by the rules.

And if that doesn’t work, then we think it really is time for the FCC to do something about Verizon and its blatant anti-competitive abuse of power.

By: alexander drewniak

Verizon: Forget the Short Codes. Let Your Customers Send SMS to Themselves and Friends. February 11th, 2008  

Stupid Rebtel. We should have known better.

Soon after Public Knowledge, Free Press and others filed a petition asking the FCC to rule that text messaging and related short codes are protected from unjust and unreasonable discrimination. Rebtel, which was named in the petition, received some attention in the press, and Verizon was none too happy about it.

I’m talking about the Verizon that reported $1 billion in earning last quarter while adding 2 million wireless customers to bring its total to 65.7 million.

The Verizon that went to Capitol Hill recently as part of the CTIA to ask that they be spared from the indignities of burdensome regulation on their text-messaging services and short-code offerings.

The same Verizon that told BusinessWeek that Rebtel can still text-message our customers to offer their service.

And the very same Verizon that is now preventing its customers from sending standard SMS text messages to themselves and their friends if they contain local phone numbers issued by Rebtel.

Goliath didn’t like the negative attention it received in the press regarding its treatment of little David. It doesn’t want people, especially people at the FCC, to know that Verizon violates their customers freedom of speech every day.

So they contacted Rebtel just before the New Year and told us that they would stop blocking their customers SMS IF Rebtel would shut down all PR on the short code issue and send a letter to the FCC in praise of Verizon and its new openness and cooperation with Rebtel.

Being the trusting souls that we are, we complied. We stopped talking to the press. And when the press called during January we explained that Verizon had seen the light, that we were talking with Verizon and expected to have an announcement from the two companies shortly.

At first Verizon complained because there were some straggler stories appearing on the Web. And then there was silence. No response to our mail. Return phone calls came to a halt. Nothing.

It took us a week or two but we finally realized that we had been tricked. Verizon had tricked us into silence. Well, shame on us! We should have known better. And now we do.

But the true shame and the real crime is that Verizon customers are being prevented from sending SMS messages to themselves and their friends from the Rebtel web site.

We’re not asking for special access or treatment. We just want Verizon customers to be able to send standard text messages to themselves and their friends regardless of the content. That’s what free speech is all about. But Verizon thinks differently.

Because it doesn’t like what’s in those SMS messages, local phone numbers that will connect Verizon customers to their friends and family abroad for just pennies per minute instead of the highway robbery charged by Verizon for the same call and because they don’t like the viral nature of the Rebtel service, Verizon shuts them down. It turns off their customers right to send SMS.

Well, live and learn, as they say. But I promise, this one ain’t over! This David, for one, is pissed.

By: alexander drewniak

Group Talk Review February 5th, 2008  

Here at Rebtel, we encourage users of our service to give us feedback on what we can do better and what we’re doing well (flattery always welcome!). Naturally, it’s very nice once in a while to hear from you guys that the work we do is appreciated embraced and makes your lives easier.

As some of you might know, not too long ago we launched a brand new, really neat Facebook app called Group Talk . Group Talk allows users to set up conference calls with each other in a truly simplified manner. You don’t even have to be a Facebook member to join in on the conversation – how sweet is that?

Recently, Group Talk got some well-deserved attention from the wicked people over at the blog Facebook Applications . They write reviews on different, cool, and useful apps you can find on Facebook, and recently they wrote about us (woohoo!!). Here is a short snippet from the review:

“…for people like me living abroad with so many friends to call and so many hours spend in websites providing services like this application does, Group Talk is a really interesting application that lets me stay checking all my stuff in my Facebook plus get connected for free in some cases, or at really cheap rates, with a great quality of sound.”

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank the nice people over at Facebook Applications for the wonderful review (they gave us 4 out of a possible 5, woohoo again!). Thanks guys. Please keep providing all the Social Media and Facebook types like us and others out there with insightful reports!

Lastly, if you have written a review about our Facebook app, our service in general, or have any tips or suggestions on how we can make what we are doing better, please do not hesitate to send an email our way.

Until next time, have a wonderful week!

By: alexander drewniak