Yes! It looks like at least one of the major mobile operators has started to come around to Rebtel’s way of thinking. T-Mobile’s new pricing plan, Business 1-Plan, allows business customers to call the US and Europe with their inclusive minutes. (International calls are generally excluded from such packages: instead you have to ‘activate’ the service and then pay ridiculous rates for your calls.)

We’re glad to see one of the major operators saying what we’ve been saying for the past two years – international calls shouldn’t cost the earth. Of course, as this is for business customers only it’s still a long way from the kind of open communication model we’d like to see, but it’s a start.

And in the meantime? We’re still here to help you get the most out of your inclusive minutes – and with Rebtel, you can save on calls to anywhere in the world. Not just Europe and the US. Now that’s the business.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you’re not a Facebook user you should join just to use Group Talk.  It makes it super easy to set up free conference calls and has lots of cool bells and whistles worth checking out. 

Once you’ve downloaded Group Talk you can set up a free conference call with as may people as you want in less than a minute.  You just enter your Facebook friends’ names, and click Add.  You can then make the call private – just for the people invited – or public, which makes the call open to any of your friends who want to join. To include people who are not Facebook users you enter the participants’ names, mobile phone numbers or landline numbers and their email addresses, and click Add.  That’s it. Everyone invited to a Group Talk call automatically receives a local dial-in number in the city or country where they live via SMS (text message) or email.  For the first person who joins a conference call, Group Talk offers to notify all of the other invited participants that the Group Talk session is starting. 

Facebook users are able to see public Group Talk conference calls as they’re happening that have been set up by their friends, by members of the Facebook groups that they’ve joined, or by the organizers of events they’ve been invited to attend, and can get a phone number to join any of those Group Talk calls with a single click of the mouse. 

And because Group Talk is built by Rebtel, conference call participants’ personal phone numbers are always kept private. 

Group Talk conference calls are always free – no matter how long you talk. So give it a try.  Do something fun.  Get your friends or family together to celebrate someone’s birthday.  If you’re an Aussie living abroad, set up a Group Talk call with all your mates back home the Saturday after next for Australia Day.  And now that Rebtel is up and running in Shanghai don’t forget Chinese New Year – it’s just around the corner. But whatever you do with Group Talk please drop us a line and tell us what you think.  We hope you enjoy it. Happy talking.

Opening this market has been in the works for a long time.  It’s one of the toughest markets to get into.  So we’re very proud to be the first to give people in Shanghai local numbers they can use to ring friends anywhere in the world.

This local number service that Rebtel invented is what gives the 24 million residents of Shanghai a choice to either make super low-cost calls to any phone, anwhere in the world, or make free international calls to friends, family or work colleagues living in one of the other 39 Rebtel countries.

When we started Rebtel last year some influential bloggers were skeptical that the Rebtel service would take off.  They said that asking your friend to hang up and call back on their local number for you while you stayed on the line, was too complex.

Well guess what?  Thousands upon thousands of people do it regularly.  And, many more thousands are signing up every week to give it a try.  Clearly we’re doing something right because not only is the number of Rebtel subscribers growing steadily, our users, on average, make at least three Rebtel calls per week, and their calls are getting longer and longer, meaning our minutes, too, are on a very steady growth path week-over-week.

But I digress.  Back to China and low-cost calls.

Rebtel calls from Shanghai to the U.S. cost just $0.018 per minute; $0.019 per minute from the U.S. to Shanghai.  None of the VoIP services beat that, but even their prices are better than AT&T, which charges $3.50 per minute to call a mobile phone in the China from a mobile phone in the U.S.

Rebtel calls from Shanghai to U.K. landlines cost $0.019 per minute, and $0.018 per minute to U.K. mobile phones.  Using Rebtel to call Shanghai from London is the same as from the U.S.: $0.019 per minute.  Again — Rebtel is the low-price leader among internet calling services.  And Vodafone doesn’t come close, with $3.33 per minute to call Shanghai from the U.K.

Shanghai is just the start.  We plan to expand Rebtel service to the rest of China in the New Year.  So, stand by.  We’ll keep you posted.

In the mean time — happy calling.  All of us at Rebtel wish you the happiest of holidays.  To our cusomers: Thank you!  It’s been a terrific year.  May 2008 bring everyone happiness and good fortune.  But most of all may it bring peace and freedom on earth for all.

Today we’re kicking off our holiday campaign, enabling new Rebtel customers to receive $2.00 from Rebtel for every $1.00 they put into their account through the end of the year.  

Then we give our new customers a choice:  They can donate the money to either UNICEF or Amnesty International.  They can give the funds to a friend, family member or work colleague so they can make super low-cost international calls using Rebtel.  Or, they can keep our gift in their account to make more calls.

The campaign begins today and runs until January 1^st, 2008.  Only first payments of up to $10.00 qualify for the program.

Non-paying Rebtel users – people who have previously registered and have been using Rebtel’s Smart Call service for making free global calls, or who joined Rebtel only to get a free 10 minute international call, but have never made a payment to Rebtel – may also participate.  We’re always looking for ways to help our users do good in the world.  That’s why we started Rebtel.  And we hope you’ll take us up on our offer.Happy holidays.

What I’m talking about is free or low-cost international calls without the need for Internet access. Or said another way: Rebtel service as it’s been from day No.1.

And while we’ve always thought our service was innovative, it’s super nice when you get validation from a competitor that you really did break new ground and that all the other ways of making a VoIP calls are “old school.”

This concept of removing the barriers to unrestricted communication by providing the savings of an Internet call and the convenience of a telephone has been at the heart of Rebtel since our founding in January 2006.

We are firm believers that distance in the 21st century is a myth. It doesn’t cost any more to send email to a co-worker down the hall than to a co-worker on the other side of the world. And since Rebtel is using IP for your call the same should apply to voice services.

Today, Rebtel is hands-down the cheapest way to make international calls. If you know of a cheaper per-minute rate please let us know immediately and we’ll do everything in our power to beat it.

Here are just a few examples of highly trafficked routes from the U.S. and how Rebtel compares to Skype and Jajah (in U.S. cents per minute, calling to a landline phone):

And those kinds of low-cost calls can be made from 40 countries to anywhere in the world that has phone service.

But actually – we think that free is even better. And that’s why we created Smart Calls.

Yes – to make the international segment of your call totally free requires that you and your friends jump through a hoop or two – the old hold-on, hang-up, call-back dance. But anyone who has done it once or twice will tell you it’s not really all that complicated. Nevertheless, we always leave it up to our customers to decide.

But for anyone out there that still thinks our Smart Calls are too complex, keep an eye on our Facebook application Let’s Talk. You’ll soon be pleasantly surprised. At least we hope so.

We want to make clear that was never our intention.

Earlier this year many of us at Rebtel joined the Support the Monks Protest in Burma groups on Facebook and elsewhere online. We wore our red shirts on the appointed days of protest. Some of us protested outside the Burmese Embassy. But shortly thereafter the noise and attention shifted to other hot spots and the people of Burma seemed to be quickly forgotten.

We realized that silence is exactly what the dictatorship in Burma wants. So last month the staff at Rebtel came up with a way to put our technology to work free of charge and allow people around the world to call Burmese government offices to voice their discontent and protest. (Click here for more info.)

Because we believe that freedom of speech should always be free we have created Call for Change to allow organizations worldwide to use Rebtel’s services on behalf of good causes. No strings attached.

If you are interested in putting Call for Change to work please contact Greg Spector at greg.spector@rebtel.com or call him at +1 415 717 4666.