Onet and Rebtel to Provide Polish Users with Revolutionary Solution for Calling Abroad
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN and WARSAW, POLAND – September 19, 2006 – Rebtel Networks AB, the new way to call friends and family worldwide with a mobile phone for $1 per week, and Grupa Onet.pl SA, owner of Poland’s leading Internet portal, Onet.pl, today announced a long-term strategic partnership that will create an OnetRebtel Web site exclusively for the Polish market.
Today, Onet launched a special link to www.rebtel.com for users of the Onet.pl portal, enabling consumers in Poland, and the Polish community abroad to make unlimited international calls for just $1 per week plus a cost of the local connection.
“With millions of Polish people living all over the world, the OnetRebtel international calling offer is going to be amazing. We always strive to provide our customers with the best possible service at the best possible price – wherever they are! Rebtel is a great company with a strong vision for competitive communication, and we are pleased to have them as our partner,” said Lukasz Wejchert, Onet president and CEO. “I am convinced that together with Rebtel we will change the way Polish people stay in touch with their close ones abroad and with home when traveling or working outside of Poland.”
Said Rebtel Co-founder and CEO Hjalmar Winbladh: “Onet.pl is clearly the premier online venue for everything best about Poland. No one serves the Polish people at home and abroad better than Onet.pl, which makes our partnership a match made in heaven.”
The OnetRebtel offering will be supported with a significant multi-media advertising campaign.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
How Rebtel works
Rebtel gives people local phone numbers in their country to call their friends and family who live abroad.
By making all calls local, friends and family can call each other as often as they like and talk as long as they want at the cost of the local calls.
Using Rebtel costs $1 per week – but only for the weeks the service is used. If one week a customer does not make calls they are not charged for that week.
Getting started using Rebtel is very easy:
1. People sign up for a Rebtel account at rebtel.onet.pl.
2. They enter the mobile phone numbers for their friends or family who live abroad.
3. Local numbers are created and sent in a text messages (SMS) to their phones.
That means, for example, Rebtel gives someone living in Chicago a local Chicago phone number to call their friend in Warsaw; and Rebtel gives the person living in Warsaw a local Warsaw phone number to call their friend in Chicago.
REBin – Free global calls
When the person in Chicago calls their friend in Warsaw, they ask their friend – while they stay on the line – to hang up and call right back using the Warsaw phone number displayed on the screen of their phone (which is the same number they were sent in a text message).
When that happens:
The person in Chicago is making a local call in Chicago,
Their friend in Warsaw is making a local call in Warsaw,
Rebtel connects those two local calls over the Internet, and
The international minutes are free.
REBin calls (when the person who receives the call hangs up and calls back) can be made today between more than 36 countries around the world.
REBout – Cheap global calls
Customers can use Rebtel’s REBout service to call friends and family anywhere in the world.
They simply use their local number to call their global friend. But with REBout, there’s no hanging up or hanging on. They just stay on the line and talk. However, in addition to paying their carrier for the local call, the person making the call also has to pay Rebtel a tiny per-minute fee for the international minutes, which varies depending on the country being called.
About Onet
Grupa Onet (WSE: GRO) is the leading Polish new media group. Grupa Onet conducts its new media activities through Onet.pl (www.onet.pl), Poland’s leading Internet portal, and offers numerous other services of media and communications nature. Onet.pl is part of Poland’s leading media group, TVN Group (TVN S.A.; WSE: TVN), which apart from Onet, is active in television broadcasting and production.
Portal Onet.pl was founded in June 1996. Onet.pl is the biggest and most popular multimedia portal in Poland. Apart from revenues generated by various marketing services (advertising, e-commerce, search engine marketing), Onet.pl also profits from customer services (fees) such as, content services, e-mail and hosting services, auctions, classifieds and dating services, and telecommunication services. According to the latest available data from Megapanel PBI/Gemius (as of June 2006), 77.0% of Polish Internet users make use of Onet.pl each month, and in June 2006 they accounted for 9.7 million real users. On a monthly basis it records over 2.2 billion page views.
About Rebtel
Rebtel Networks AB is a new global voice services company for individuals, micro-business professionals, and cord-cutters inside small and large businesses, who regularly call friends, family or business colleagues abroad. Unlike the large mobile telecom carriers charging exorbitant rates to recoup their high costs, Rebtel offers ultra low rates for global calling by making all calls local. For more information, and to start using Rebtel services, go to www.rebtel.com or www.rebtel.onet.pl
By: Ola Sundqvist, September 19th, 2006
Tags: hjalmar winbladh, Lukasz Wejchert, onet, rebtel, Rebtel Partners, VoIP
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