Rebtel service quick review
Rebtel Rocks! Creative, cost effective, and easy international mobile-mobile calls (affiliate link)
OK, so a month ago I get a call from a friend who is living in Japan for 6 months. He was calling me in the Czech Republic via Rebtel and despite being halfway around the world (which amounts to a heapload of latency for our voice packets traversing the Internet), the voice quality was great. I then proceed to the Rebtel website, sign up with a $10 balance and start setting up numbers for people to call. Now I talk to my brother in Patagonia, Chile using Rebtel in addition to my parents in Virginia and my colleague in New York. All mobile-to-mobile for a few cents a minute. I'm diggin' it (and so is Rebtel since I've spent $7.65 in a month). I also am a huge fan of their $1 a week subscription fee (which they only charge you if you use the service in that week)- clever way to get $50 a year out of people without them thinking that they are getting gouged.
When I first read about this company on TechCrunch, it just seemed too complicated with all the mentions of call backs, etc. However, in reality it is not that bad since you save the custom numbers for the people you want to call in your phone contacts anyway. Given the viral nature of this service, look for it to snowball once it achieves some critical mass beyond the early adopter crowd. Funded to the tune of $20mm by Index and Benchmark, they should have the staying power to make it. Their business proposition is compelling, and I suspect they are looking creatively at the question of how to take on roaming charges... That is another *huge* opportunity that should be addressable by number pairing (but they'll have to come up with a better solution than my having to have -rebtel-FR -rebtel-UK -rebtel-DE entries for everyone in my phonebook...).
Please note that the headline link of this post contains my Rebtel affiliate ID as does the ad on the right. I encourage you to check it out...
OK, so a month ago I get a call from a friend who is living in Japan for 6 months. He was calling me in the Czech Republic via Rebtel and despite being halfway around the world (which amounts to a heapload of latency for our voice packets traversing the Internet), the voice quality was great. I then proceed to the Rebtel website, sign up with a $10 balance and start setting up numbers for people to call. Now I talk to my brother in Patagonia, Chile using Rebtel in addition to my parents in Virginia and my colleague in New York. All mobile-to-mobile for a few cents a minute. I'm diggin' it (and so is Rebtel since I've spent $7.65 in a month). I also am a huge fan of their $1 a week subscription fee (which they only charge you if you use the service in that week)- clever way to get $50 a year out of people without them thinking that they are getting gouged.
When I first read about this company on TechCrunch, it just seemed too complicated with all the mentions of call backs, etc. However, in reality it is not that bad since you save the custom numbers for the people you want to call in your phone contacts anyway. Given the viral nature of this service, look for it to snowball once it achieves some critical mass beyond the early adopter crowd. Funded to the tune of $20mm by Index and Benchmark, they should have the staying power to make it. Their business proposition is compelling, and I suspect they are looking creatively at the question of how to take on roaming charges... That is another *huge* opportunity that should be addressable by number pairing (but they'll have to come up with a better solution than my having to have -rebtel-FR -rebtel-UK -rebtel-DE entries for everyone in my phonebook...).
Please note that the headline link of this post contains my Rebtel affiliate ID as does the ad on the right. I encourage you to check it out...
posted by Thomas at
3:48 AM
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3 comments
