Pat Phelan: Telecomms DisruptorSubverting telecomms from the edge of industry

We have seen a number of new or revamped products over the last few months and I wanted to examine ways to reduce you or your companies telephony charges.

Skype

With Skype packages now live there are considerable savings to be made for anyone making long distance calls. The addition of Skype mobile yesterday and the 3 Skypephone takes the company to the very top of the telephony tree.

Rebtel
The awakened giant of telecoms, last year the company was lazy and bloated, now with a huge regeneration in place, traffic is booming, I had a long chat with founder Hjalmar Windbladh recently and the figures he gave me are astounding,sworn me to secrecy though nevertheless this appears to borne out with a quick glance at traffic to the Rebtel site.They recently launched Rebtel in China which may also be impacting

Truphone.
What can I say? The strength of any company is in its engine room and network manager James Body is shovelling coal on a very regular basis. Truphone closed a huge round last week in an extremely difficult market. The quality of their wifi client is excellent and with their recent purchase of sim4travel who knows where they may pop up. Calls are very reasonably priced and quality above all else is king here.

Mobivox
One of my particular favourites, a seriously useful product, upload your contacts, dial one in country number and you are good to go, one complaint though, quality lately has been poor again, I know they are working on it so hopefully they will get it right.

Jajah
Jajah appears to be changing its focus recently to become the WorldCom of 2.0 communications, I am not hearing a lot from them on their customer focused plans, it seems to be all enterprise focused at present, I am sure Irish CEO Trevor Healy has plans up his sleeve for later this year though. Excellent product though with very competitive rates.

Iotum
Buddy Alec Saunders company is flying high with its free conference call on facebook application, its also a way to make free calls ( Luca
tells you how)

VAPPS
Staying on the conference call theme, if your company makes a lot of conference calls my number one choice is VAPPS, I am a customer and am delighted with the service unlimited packages and free dialling in from Skype make this a serious cost reducer for any company.

Sitifono
Sitofono is one of Italy’s top telecoms company’s,the companies click-to-call product place a button on your website that enables your visitors to call you for free on your telephone. No point in having customers on your companies website unless you are talking to them, this eliminates the cost to your customer of calling you, always a good thing.

Mobile Packages
If you have a number of Blackberries,mobile phones, mobile broadband dongles its certainly worth your while to bring in an independent consultant and have him analyse your monthly bill, the savings to be had from a yearly review will more than cover the cost of his fee

Roaming
On the roaming front there are probably 4 companies worth looking at (I may be a bit biased here so pardon me if I am )
MAXroam obviously, United-Mobile, TravelSim,SIM4travel and Celtrek.
What can I see without appearing too biased, well there is 20 billion a year spent on extortionate roaming fees, 25% of that business would do MAXroam, I think its a huge market and is only waking up, Huge plans afoot in all these companies although I am a believer in maximum numbers of countries covered and not penalizing your friends for calling you.

Have I forgotten anyone?
Would love to hear your suggestions

and ok the embarrassing staring you in the face list (sorry folks, its a money saving post)

SpinVox
I forgot the value proposition on SpinVox, if you are overseas who wants to spend a fortune on dialling back to their voicemail. SpinVox delivers your voicemail converted to text, wonderful product I use it myself, thanks to James Whatley for the spanking.

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