Rebtel Blog

E-Plus Blocks Rebtel Access Numbers In Germany

Dear Rebtel friends,

Once again an operator has decided to block our local numbers for calling. Thanks to all users who were quick to inform us about the problem.

This time it’s the third largest operator in Germany E-Plus. We have contacted E-Plus and asked for an explanation on why they are stopping their own customers from calling a standard local number.

However the reason why E-Plus wants to stop Rebtel is of course the very high margins on their international calling. But it’s a short-sighted way of stopping any threats to their diminishing margins. Their actions violate not only the EU-regulations but are also a breach of E-Plus customers’ contracts. With their rates, lockins and hidden charges they can be 1000% more expensive than Rebtel. Please feel free to compare our rates to their rates..

If you are as upset as we are about this please consider sending an e-mail to the E-Plus support.

To summarize, we are sorry this happened. It shouldn’t have to. Enough said is that it has happened many times before but with over 3 million users Rebtel is currently not being blocked by any operator in the world. Except E-Plus. The reason why we are never blocked is something E-Plus is about to experience when their users start contacting them.

Please follow the latest developments and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section on this post or follow us on Twitter.

Lastly, if you would be so kind, please help us raise awareness about this problem by digging this post on Digg, retweeting it or perhaps posting it to your Facebook profile.

Thank you and take care!

More:
http://www.eplus.de/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Plus

Update: The person that handle these types of anti-competitive issues in the European Commission is called Viviane Reding. Viviane is the Commissioner for Information Society and Media and we should all make her aware of what is going on. If you have a few minutes to spare, please send her an email on viviane.reding@ec.europa.eu and let her know how you feel.

Carriers, Jump On The VoIP Bandwagon

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.

It’s That Time Again!

It’s that time again folks - holiday season is officially here (well, more or less). All of us that work here at Rebtel like to think that Christmas is a special time of the year for a lot of our users. See, a majority of you use our service to keep in touch with friends and family when you’re away during the year doing all kinds of stuff. Maybe you’re away to attend school abroad, maybe you’re backpacking in Europe for a couple of months to widen your horizon or you might be busy working out of the country and are forced to be away from the people that matter the most to you. Christmas is a holiday when a lot of you get the opportunity to come home, step through the door and finally reunite with your loved ones after spending a long time apart.

To celebrate this we are launching our Holiday Offer. What’s special about it is that it’s primarily targeted to our existing users. Some of you have contacted us through email, Facebook and Twitter and asked us why we haven’t been giving away any sweet deals to the people that have been with us the longest through thick and thin. Well, we sure haven’t forgotten about you and this is our little present that will hopefully make you feel warm inside.

When you make a deposit of $50 we give you a little holiday bonus, 20% more talk time to be exact. If you’re not happy with that and want more, you have the option of making a $100 or $150 deposit to receive 30% or 40% more talk time than you would otherwise. Have a look below to get the idea. Doesn’t look to shabby, does it?

Lastly, we would like to thank all of you that have supported and believed in us throughout 2008. Next year will be even better, you can count on that.

From all of us at Rebtel, we wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Welcome Newcomers!

Up until today you’ve been able to use the fabulous Rebtel service from 47 countries world wide. We’ve had a great time together and we love all 47 of them equally. Just as if they were our own.

Today though, is a big day for us. We’re announcing 3 brand new additions to the Rebtel family; Panama, Malta and Puerto Rico. Obviously - we’re thrilled about this. We’re hoping that you, our wonderful users, as well as our older countries that has been with us for a little bit longer will make these newcomers feel welcome. Hjalmar Winbladh, our CEO, is so excited that he even decided to learn some Spanish He’s been running around the office for the last few days shouting “El pueblo unido, jamas sera vencido”.

In practice, these good news mean that all the wonderful people in Panama, Malta and Puerto Rico will be liberated at last from the tyranny of deceiving calling cards and the captivity of carriers with horrendously priced international calling rates. Thou shalt not fear - Rebtel has come to the rescue!

Naturally, if you live in any of the other 47 Rebtel countries you are now able to make Smarts Calls to friends, family or girlfriends living in any of the new countries.

Check out the rates below to get an idea of how much you’ll be able to save:

• Puerto Rico to any phone anywhere in the U.S. - $0.015 per minute.
• Panama to Colombia - $0.029 per minute to landlines; $0.095 per minute to mobiles.
• Malta to the U.K. - $0.019 per minute to landlines; $0.18 per minute to mobiles.

And for all new customers who sign up before December 18 the rates are even lower for their first 30 days of calling:

• Malta to the U.K. - $0.013 per minute to landlines; $0.126 per minute to mobiles.
• Puerto Rico to the U.S. - less than a penny per minute - $0.008 per minute to any phone.
• Panama to Colombia - $0.015 per minute to landlines; $0.067 per minute to mobiles.

To read more about our Cheapest Rates campaign, click here to read our post on the subject that touches on the subject in slightly greater detail.

As always, if you have any questions about Rebtel, be sure to check out our Get Satisfaction page.

Crunchies 2008 Are Coming Up!

Here in Stockholm there’s been a blizzard for the last few days. Nights are colder, days are longer and meaner. Thick flings of snow are poring down like there would be no tomorrow and Stockholm is gloomier than ever. The sweet, warm summer breeze of June, July and August has never felt more distant than right now. If you would like to bring a little bit of warmth and sunshine into our lives we would be very grateful if you voted for Rebtel in the Mobile category for this years Crunchies Awards.

The 2008 Crunchies is the second annual competition and award ceremony put together to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. The Crunchies is co-hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider, and TechCrunch. Best of all, the Internet community is invited to choose who wins.

If you like our service and what we’re trying to do for telephony, please don’t hesitate casting a vote our way by simply clicking the little button above. In return we promise you better prices, greater innovations, and a cooler service. Not like you wont get all of that if you decide not to vote - but still
Thanks in advance guys, we appreciate the support!

Has Rebtel made your life easier?

Here at Rebtel we get a lot of emails (with emphasize on a lot) from users around the world telling us what they think about what we do and most importantly; how we do it.

To be perfectly honest with you (and I’m saying this with the most humble tone of voice possible), a great majority of these emails say that we are really great. Just like everyone else we enjoy getting these kind of emails so by all means, please continue sending them

Although, every once in a while we do hear from people that aren’t as “happy go-lucky” as the other guy and don’t really feel like showering us with compliments. This is also totally cool with us.

The point is that regardless if you guys have something good or bad to say about us we still really want to hear about it. What’s more important, we want everybody else to hear about it as well. If you believe that we have solved a problem for you and made your life a tiny bit easier we want to make that publicly available for everyone to see.

With that said, we invite you to log on to www.getsatisfaction.com/rebtel and write something, good or bad, about Rebtel. It doesn’t have to be an academic essay with some in-depth analysis, a few sentences will do the trick and in return we will be eternally grateful

Have a great weekend guys!

Be a Nice Friend and Rebtel Citizen

It’s Friday today and yet another Rebtel week is coming to an end. It’s quite the cliché but I must say that it’s always surprising when you wake up on a Friday morning and it feels like Monday was just yesterday. I guess that’s what working in a fast paced start-up environment does to your time perception

Now that we have the debacle with German giants O2 behind us (water under the bridge guys, we don’t like to hold grudges) I thought I would take this opportunity to tell you a little bit about our new Tell-a-Friend program.

For those of you that don’t know what the Tell-a-Friend program is, allow me to briefly “tell” the story. Tell-a-Friend is located on our website on the “Invites” tab under “My Rebtel”. On this page you can import email addresses from friends, family or business acquaintances and send them personalized invites to join you and the rest of the cool people in the Rebtel community.  As of right now, you can import contacts from your Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, Windows Live (formerly known as Hotmail) and LinkedIn accounts. We constantly look to add new import sources as all of us have our contacts stored in a variety of locations.

Those were the technicalities; let’s proceed to the fun bit

For the first 20 friends that you send an invitation to that decides to sign up because they think Rebtel sounds like a pretty sweet service (partially because you are using it), your account will be credited with 10 minutes of free calling (remember that they have to make a call to someone for you to get those minutes).

So what now, does it end here you might think? It certainly doesn’t!

With the new Tell-a-Friend, you are not only able to earn minutes, you can also earn dollars (yes, dollars). For the first 20 friends of yours that signs up through your invite and makes a payment to their Rebtel accounts you will receive $10. Yes, you heard right, $10.

So what’s the conclusion from all this? Well, if you haven’t contributed to a better world with a good deed today, this is the perfect opportunity. Give a friend the opportunity of calling someone they like for only a couple of cents instead of a couple of dollars. To get going with Tell-a-Friend you are just one click away.

From me and the rest of the Rebtel Team, have a great weekend!

Ps. Your friends get 20 minutes of free calls by signing up through your Tell-a-friend invitation, now that is a good deed..

Rebtel Wins Battle Against O2

Dear friends,

Victory!

Rebtel is officially back in town and we’re planning on staying for a loooong time without any unexpected interruptions Everyone at Rebtel has been working frantically on the O2 case the last couple of weeks and we are unbelievably happy to announce that as of this afternoon, we are no longer blocked by O2 in Germany.

First off, we want to thank all of our users for the massive support and help during the past couple of weeks. Without your personal support, blogging, Tweets, Diggs, Facebook status messages, emails to O2’s CEO and phone calls to their support staff we could never have made our voice loud enough for O2 to hear us. With the Rebtel community being able to come to terms with O2 on this matter we have proved that together we are strong. We held our ground and the persistency surely paid off.

We will continue to update our blog with the latest news so to make sure to add our feed to your RSS reader or simply bookmark http://blog.rebtel.com. To see the press release in full, please click here.

Once again, thank you friends and all the very best!

/Alex and the rest of the fabulous Rebtel Team

PS. Now we’re going back to basics and to our daily routine which consists of pushing the calling prices as low as they can possibly get. All of you guys as Rebtel friends can help us out with this by telling your friends about us and as icing on the cake, we’ll give you up to $200! It’s the truth. Click here for more info.

Rebtel Featured In Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal is without a doubt considered as one of the most influential news publications we have in the world today. To get a mention in “The Journal” is something not a lot of companies can boast about but as of yesterday, Rebtel is among the select few.

To check out the article, click here.

Party Is On - Rebtel Officially Best In Class

There has been little to no guidance for people looking for the cheapest rates in the jungle of Mobile VoIP providers. A lot of companies make claims saying they have the cheapest rates but most of the times they fail to back it up. Well, here at Rebtel we actually try our best to always practice what we preach and now we have something to officially show for it.

An independent third-party research company based in London called Technology Appraisals has done a pretty, pretty extensive comparative study on 15 Mobile VoIP Providers and their prices. You might have figured out where I’m going with this and you are completely right. We won!

Out of all companies featured in the study, Jajah and Truphone to name two, Rebtel was crowned best in class and overall price leader. This is obviously great for all you guys being our users but it’s just as great for us as a company. There are a lot of factors that make up Rebtel in terms of our own values and benefits we want give our users but there are two in particular that we never have (and never will) compromise on: reliable quality of service and reliably low rates. We like to think we have the best quality (hopefully you agree with us) and now it’s finally official that we do have the lowest rates. Among others, the cool people over at TMCNet covered the story and you can find it here.

So what are the learnings here? Well, we think you should give yourself a nice pat on the back, have a cold drink in the sun with someone you really like and feel extra smart because you use Rebtel

Ps. Don’t forget to friend us up on Plurk and Twitter to have a chat and get the latest updates from us