Call Bangladesh for 3.5¢ per minute, down from 3.9¢.

Call Ethiopia for a mere 15.9¢ per minute, down from 20.5¢.

Call Cuba for 79.9¢ per minute, down from the old 93.9¢.

We work hard to maintain our high quality and super low rates to all calling destinations in the world and as a Rebtel user, you can help us (and yourselves) along the way. The more people that jump on the Rebtel bandwagon and decide they want to call more for less, the lower the rates will go.

So in addition to helping us lower our rates and being an awesome friend for helping your loved ones find a better calling alternative to calling cards, you also get free Rebtel calling credit. Just use our Tell Friends feature on our site to get started!

Happy Calling!

This is all well and good. We love Free Calls and our Rebtel friends do too, but as unfortunate as it might be, the feature is limited to your friends living in these specific countries.

Enter our Tell Friends feature.

By letting friends and family know about Rebtel and saving them from the evil paws of calling cards and complicated desktop clients, you’re not only being a good sport, but you also earn $10 worth of calling credit for every friend that likes Rebtel and goes on to make a payment.

Recently, we added new sharing features to Tell Friends, including Facebook, Twitter and offline sharing. Below you will find a step-by-step guide on how to go about setting up a personal profile page and start sharing it with friends and family.

1. Make Your Profile Visible

Start off by going to Settings and then click on the Profile Page tab. In order for your friends to be able to see your page, you need to make it public. You can also set your own vanity URL under this tab. Be sure to choose wisely, as there’s no way of changing it later. When you’re done, it should look something like in the image below and you can proceed by clicking Edit profile page.

2. Set Up Your Profile Page

Your profile page is just what it sounds like; your own page on Rebtel that you can refer your friends to. It’s also the spot where we link to in your email invites, tweets and Facebook posts. Whenever someone signs up from your page and end up making a payment, you get $10 worth of Rebtel credit to call for.

Fill out your name, where you’re from and tell us something about yourself. You can also choose to write a short message in the speech bubble why you think your friends should give Rebtel a try. In mine for instance, it says: “Try Rebtel and experience international calling the way it should be; cheap, simple to use and smart.”

When you’re done, click Save.

3. Share Your Page

Here comes the fun stuff! When you’re happy with your page you can go ahead and start sharing it. There are a number of different ways to share you page to let’s dive right in.

Type a few email addresses

Do you know a bunch of email addresses to your closest friends and family by memory? Super! Then you can type them in this box.

Invite friends from your email account

If you’re like, well, most people, and tend not to memorize email addresses you can easily import your contacts from your Yahoo!, Gmail, AOL or Outlook account. Pick and choose who you want to receive your invite and click Send.

Share on Facebook & Twitter

This is our newest sharing addition to the Tell Friends feature. If you’re one of the more than 500 million people spending time on Facebook, you probably have a friend or two that do too. All you have to do is click the Share button, write a message to your friends to go along with the post and click Share again. Once the post is in your news feed, it will look something like this.

Promote offline

If you’re in school and have a message board in your library or dorm building, we have a way for you to share Rebtel the “offline way” by putting up a good old fashioned poster. The screen name that you picked for your profile page URL actually works as referral code too. So whenever someone signs up with that code and makes a payment, you get the credit. For more detailed instructions on how to use this method, go here.

Happy sharing everyone!

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 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.

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

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