How To: Combine Rebtel With Google Voice December 10th, 2010  

Google Voice is a nifty phone service that gives you a new phone number. But, it’s not just any number. It replaces all your existing numbers that you have for all your other phones. Your office phone, your work mobile, your home phone and so on and so forth. Once you have a Voice account, you can connect all those existing phones to your new Google Voice number, so when someone gives you a call, all three of your phones associated with Google Voice will ring. Pretty cool.

You can also use Google Voice to initiate calls from your browser and the good thing about it is that if you live in the US or Canada, you can make domestic calls completely free of charge. Add Rebtel to the mix, who gives you a local number to call instead of your friends’ international numbers, and suddenly you don’t have to pay the local cost for the call to your regular carrier when you call abroad with Rebtel. Only the super cheap Rebtel rates, which are considerably lower than Google’s.

How To Call With Rebtel Using Google Voice

1. Get a Google Voice account here.

2. Get a Rebtel account here. Don’t forget to sign up with your new Google Voice number that you got in the first step. If you already have a Rebtel account, just add your new Google Voice number to your account under Settings and make it a preferred phone.

3. Add the international number that you want to call to your Rebtel contact list. A local number will be instantly generated and sent to you via email and SMS so you can easily save it to your address book on your phone.

4. Open up Google Voice your in browser, type in the local Rebtel number to your friend that you got in the previous step and start talking away.

Lastly, don’t forget that you can call friends living in one of our 50 countries for free. When they pick up, ask them to hang up and call you back on the local number displayed on their phone while you stay on the line. The call will be instantly connected, and in addition to not paying for the local part of the call, you won’t have to pay the Rebtel charge for the international part of the call either. Talk for as long as you want, for free.

If your friend is running our Android app, the call will automatically be turned into a Rebtel Free Call without him having to hang up and call you back.

Happy calling!

By: alexander drewniak Tags: , , , , ,

Google Voice, Skype, Truphone and Rebtel – Who is really the cheapest? September 20th, 2010  

In times like these, when Google are integrating voice in Gmail and new international calling services are emerging from the ground like mushrooms, international callers around the world have never been better off. To briefly describe the current climate in voice, you can say that the competition is growing fierce and as a result, calling rates are being pushed further and further down. All companies in our space are forced to innovate, offer their users more convenience and added value. Maintaining a consistent and reliable call quality is simply an implied a must.

Here at Rebtel, we love all this new found competition. Trust me, it gets us fired up like nothing else. But most of all, we’re happy for you, the user. When the dust settles, you are undoubtedly the ones that ultimately will walk away as winners.

However, until that infamous dust does settle, we’ve prepared a nice little side-by-side comparison pitting our rates against the likes of Google Voice, Skype, Truphone to help you get a better picture of where we all are in terms of price. We know, there’s a lot more than just price that goes in to the process of evaluating which service to go with. But regardless how you twist and turn it, rates are a very important factor.

We randomly picked out 8 different calling destinations and compared our own prices with rates of the aforementioned competitors. However, this wasn’t as straightforward as you might think. If you use Truphone, you have to put up with a connection fee of 4.8c for every call placed. If you use Skype to call landlines and mobiles using Skype Credit and Skype Pro, you also have to put up with connection fees, which can be as high as 9.1c. However, Skype connection fees don’t apply to users that are subscribers.

Out of all 4, Rebtel and Google Voice are the only services completely liberated of any connection fees.

Google Voice, Skype, Truphone and Rebtel Price Comparison

*Google Voice offers free domestic calls but is currently only available for US users

Is the rate to the country you call not featured in the comparison? No worries, see a full list of our super cheap call rates.

By: alexander drewniak Tags: , , , , ,

Carriers, Jump On The VoIP Bandwagon August 18th, 2009  

It’s time for yet another blog post from the Rebtel Team. Things are great here at the office in Stockholm. Most of us are back from our much needed summer vacations, feeling rejuvenated and ready to take on the fall of 2009. While we’re on the topic, how’s your summer been? Feel free to let us know in the comments below :)

We have a lot of new cool stuff for you that we’ve been working on for the past year or so and things are finally starting to come together. We’ll have more on that in another post.

Anyways. Today, we’d like to talk a little bit about the recent developments on the front of VoIP applications being (or rather not being) on Apple’s AppStore. In particular one that has been developed by Google and seen immense media attention lately.

If you have an ounce of interest in what’s going on in this little world of ours (the technology and VoIP world that is), you have probably read that Apple made the decision to refuse Google’s latest iPhone application, Google Voice, entry to the AppStore. Now, you might ask yourself why we would dedicate an entire blog post to a company that seemingly starts to emerge as a direct competitor to us? The answer is simple. Sure, Google is a direct competitor with the roll-out of their Voice service. Although, the fact remains that we love Google as a company, their products and everything that they’re trying to do in the VoIP industry. Competition is good and always will be. It forces all companies to think outside of the box and try their utmost to provide their respective markets with a better product.

For a lot of people, Apple’s decision was nothing short of anticipated. Being the eternal optimists that we are, we figured that Apple might reevaluate their position considering their history of disruptive services. We all remember the inception of the iTunes Music Store, right? That was a product that revolutionized an entire industry that was, at that particular time, on life support. Apple were smart enough to recognize that opportunity and give it CPR. After that, we saw the music business basically resurrect and iTunes ultimately became the blueprint for digital music commerce.

Come 2009 and things aren’t quite as chipper as they once were. Apple’s disappointing decisions to go to bed with “the devil” has proven to hinder huge innovation developments in the VoIP industry that literally is standing outside their door knocking and begging to come in.

Now you might think referring to AT&T as “the devil” is a tad bit too harsh. If that’s the case, we feel it’s imperative to take a trip down memory lane to see just how uneager these cartels really are to embrace companies such as ourselves and Google and the subsequent technology we’re trying to bring forward.

Some of you might remember our little run-in with Verizion. Verizon didn’t seem to think that obeying one of the most vital cornerstones of democracy and the american constitution, freedom of speech, was very important.

Then, of course, we had AT&T, which we also went a couple of bare knuckle rounds with.

Last but not least, we had O2, which didn’t think it was in their customers right to use a service like Rebtel’s due to what they claimed were “capacity issues”.

Come on, really?

Since when does calling a local number on a mobile phone in 2009 cause “capacity issues” for one of Europe’s largest wireless service providers?

As you can easily make out, these people don’t exactly have a soft spot for us and honestly, who can really blame them? They’re feeling the heat and have been for a long time. If anything, their actions against us as described above prove that. Truth to be told, it can’t possibly be a good feeling realizing that you live on borrowed time and that your days are truly numbered. That’s some epiphany for you right there.

So, how’s all of this going to unfold? By the looks of it hopefully for the better. As a matter of fact, the US Department of Justice has recently initiated an investigating regarding U.S. telecommunications companies, such as AT&T and Verizon, to clarify wether or not they’re engaging in anti-competitive behavior.

Furthermore, the FCC has also raised some eyebrows of concern regarding the Google Voice rejection and decided to investigate the situation further by sending personal letters to Apple, Google and AT&T. Once thing is for sure, we can’t wait to hear what AT&T writes in their response letter.

Apple themselves have actually also done something rather peculiar that deviates from their regular practice when dealing with the developer community that, little surprising, went completely ballistic after the rejection and talked about going as far as boycotting Apple. Phil Shiller, Senior Vice President of World Wide Product Marketing, personally contacted two different developers that were outraged by the companies recent behavior. This was naturally a nice gesture, but it’s hardly enough to rectify and make up for the de facto damaged already caused.

Ladies and gentleman, the plot thickens.

By: alexander drewniak Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,