Rebtel Takes Phony Out of Mobile Telephony
INNOVATE!EUROPE, ZARAGOZA, SPAIN – May 17, 2006 - Rebtel Networks AB, a new mobile telecommunications services company, www.rebtel.com, today announced it will offer new ways to call friends, family and work colleagues around the world for a fraction of the cost charged by the leading mobile telecom carriers today.
When the service is available in June, mobile phone users in 40 countries will be able to stop calling expensive international numbers and instead create and use standard local numbers for those calls.
“Outrageous pricing for international mobile phone calls will soon be a thing of the past,” said Hjalmar Winbladh, president and CEO of Rebtel. “For $1 USD per week – less than what many people spend daily on coffee – we can give you local numbers for your friends abroad. For example, I’ll give my friend in San Francisco a San Francisco number to call me, and I’ll get a Stockholm number for him that I will use. Then all our mobile calls will be at our normal local rates.”
Officially unveiled today, Stockholm-based Rebtel is in the final stages of testing its network.
How Rebtel works
To get started, consumers will go to www.rebtel.com, and sign up for a Rebtel account. Once logged in, they enter their mobile phone number and the mobile phone number of a global friend, and Rebtel will instantly create a pair of local numbers they can use to call each other from then on.
Once set up, Rebtel will charge consumers $1 USD per week to access two new services, called REBin and REBout, for unlimited talking to all of their friends abroad when calling a local number.
Using REBout, consumers will be able to call anyone in the world using a local number and only pay their carrier for the local call, plus a small per-minute fee to Rebtel to cover the interconnect charges for the international part of the call. The REBout charge for a call to the U.S., for instance, will be as low as 2 cents per minute.
Hang up, hang on, hang out
But for those who think that’s too expensive Rebtel offers a new and different service called REBin, where users’ local calls are connected with their global friends’ local calls in a virtual room on the Internet, called a REBroom.
In the REBroom all calls are free – no matter how many, how often or how long. No additional charges over the $1 USD per week fee and the cost of the local calls that most consumers have already paid for with their mobile carrier.
To get to the REBroom, when friends phone, instead of answering, the user simply hangs up, and while the friend hangs on, the user calls the friend’s local number. The two calls are then automatically connected, and the friends can hang out and talk for as long as they like, and not worry about the cost.
With Rebtel, consumers can use the mobile phones they own today, and don’t have to buy anything else, download software, get a new SIM card, use a headset connected to a computer, or worry about confusing additional charges.
Consumers need to sign up to create local numbers, but to call a local number created by a Rebtel user, no sign-up is necessary. And, users will only be charged Rebtel’s $1 USD per week service fee if they actually make calls. If no calls are made during a week there are no charges.
“If you can make a local call on your mobile phone, you can be rebbing within minutes for free,” said Winbladh. “It’s super easy.”
Terms and conditions
To register, consumers use a credit card or PayPal account for an initial $5 USD or $10 USD charge. An auto top-up function will be available in increments of $10 USD or $20 USD when the balance falls below $2 USD.
If users are not pleased in the first 30 days, Rebtel will refund their initial fees in full. After that, users may cancel at any time, and any remaining funds in their account may be used until empty.
“People are sick of mobile carriers’ fine print, lock-ups, hidden charges, and crazy-high rates for making international calls,” said Winbladh, who co-founded Sendit AB in 1994, a pioneering mobile Internet software company he took public before it was acquired by Microsoft Corp. “It may sound silly and naive, but we’re committed to using the latest Internet technology for international calling today and for local calls and roaming services tomorrow, and pushing the cost and convenience benefits back to our users.”
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