Public Service Announcement – Still Free Calls With Rebtel
June 16th, 2008
Hola compadres!
During the past week there has been a lot of buzz going around in the Voip blogosphere regarding our friends over at Mobivox and Truphone. They have both been written and talked about quite frequently but unfortunately not in the most flattering of ways. Until very recently, Rebtel, Mobivox and Truphone all had something in common. We all offered free internationall calls. As sad as it is, all that stopped when Mobivox and Truphone both announced they have decided to discontinue their free calling service.
All this drama has been the reason for these two companies being on a lot of people’s lips. When Mobivox made this announcement on their forum it caused an outrage among their users. Although, one has to give Mobivox some credit for making the announcement using a way more personal message vehicle than a press release and that must have at least somewhat relieved a few customers irritation. Good job guys!
We are extremely happy here at Rebtel that there are other likeminded companies like us out there that truly try to be on the end users side. We really do. Luckily, there is an alternative for all these people that still want to make free international calls, even though it’s not with Mobivox or Truphone. Our very own Rebtel equivalent service, Smart Call, is still alive and kicking and not going anywhere!
Our mission here at Rebtel is to create resonance in the telecom space, to disrupt and put an end to the “daylight robbery” that takes place every time we make an international call with our mobile phone to our sister or friend living abroad. This world of ours is becoming increasingly borderless and keeping in touch with your loved ones is more imperative than ever. So, if you can think of anyone out there that just moved to the other side of the world to start a new job or to study, call them and give them a few encouraging words and tell them you miss them.
Oh yeah, don’t forget to tell them we said hi 
By: alexander drewniak
Tags: international calls, mobivox, smart calls, truphone, voip
In-Flight Calls With Verizon
April 26th, 2008
As you might know, some of us from the Rebtel crew are over in sunny San Francisco, California to attend the Web 2.0 Expo. The Expo, which ended on Friday, was really awesome and featured some very heavy names from this web world of ours. A selection of some of the people we were fortunate enough to see include Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media), Jonathan Schwartz (CEO at Sun Microsystems), and Marc Andreesen (co-author of the first web browser Mosaic and currently with Ning).
We will cover some of the most interesting talks from a Rebtel perspective in a later post. To make sure you don’t miss it, you can go ahead and subscribe to our blogs RSS Feed.
Anyhow, on our flight from Chicago to San Francisco we noticed that Verizon offers a solution for in-flight calls. That’s great you might say, considering you are not (yet) allowed to use your mobile phone on board an aircraft to call your business acquaintance or your friend waiting for you on the ground to pick up you up. Phones on planes are pretty much ubiquitous and not new thing in any shape or form so nothing really remarkable there. Although, what did catch our attention, was the price they charged. If you’re a sensitive person, you might want to hold on to something. To call with Verizon on a United Airlines flight, you have to pay the ridiculous amount of $10 per minute + taxes and a setup fee (see the image above). God knows how much that setup fee is but the point is, for us that are accustomed to making international calls for just a few cents per minute, this was a pretty shocking revelation. Trust me.
So what are the learnings here? Well, you will be able to call use your mobile phone on flights sooner rather than later so maybe Rebtel should get into the market of offering ultra-cheap international calls while in the air? You know what, maybe be will! What we do know for certain is that we have barely scratched the surface of what is possible and we still have a long way to go on our road towards making sure as many people as possible have the opportunity to make international calls for the cost of a local call.
Best wishes from San Francisco,
Alex
By: alexander drewniak
Tags: international calls, rebtel staff, telecom cartels, Verizon, web 2.0 expo
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