State of The Art: Overseas Calls Made Cheap, if Not Easy
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Why pay for the privilege of transmitting your voice along cables buried under the ocean, when the Internet is capable of transmitting it free?
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The beta VoIP service is easy to set up and works well--but how long will the company be able to give away long-distance phone service?
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Continuing its expansion into the Wireless Internet Phone Market, Globe7 launched two new USB phones with a value based calling plan that is sure to make consumers take note. $120 is the total consumer outlay. Customers can make unlimited calls to 25 countries for one year.
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By ROBERT EVATT World Business Writer  Picking phone and television services used to be simpler. There were fewer choices, but dealing with the companies almost boiled down to a reflex action.
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Cell phone contacts find their way into new phones for $1.99 a month--without the thumb strain.
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(InfoWorld) - While mobile operators claim to be cutting the cost of roaming, their efforts are just a smoke screen and have no appreciable effect on charges overall, a European consumer rights group has said. The lower tariffs are typically available for a limited duration, sometimes requiring payment of an additional subscription fee, and may only be cheaper for long calls made using certain networks, BEUC, the European Consumers' Organisation, said on Tuesday. The fees should be capped at â¬0.33 ($0.43) per minute for customers roaming outside their home country, consumer groups said . Their demand is considerably lower than the cap of â¬0.49 per minuteÂ proposed by the European CommissionÂ in draft legislation that could be voted by June. Viviane Reding, Commissioner for Information Society and Media,Â announced plans last FebruaryÂ to crack down on mobile phone roaming charges, which she said were unreasonably high. On July 12, the Commission proposed cutting by 70 percent the cost of making and receiving calls while travelling in another European Union member state, saving European consumers â¬5 billion a year, according to the Commission's figures. Under the Commission's proposal, operators will be allowed to charge no more than â¬0.16 per minute for calls received while travelling abroad, â¬0.33 per minute for calls made within the country being visited, or â¬0.49 per minute for calls made back home or to a third country while abroad. However, that's still too much for the consumer groups, which called for charges of â¬0.16, â¬0.25 and 0.33 per minute, respectively. The French Consumers' Union (UFC - Que Choisir) called for national telecommunications regulators to collect more information about the volume of incoming, outgoing and local roaming calls, and the wholesale prices charged by operators for each type of call. Without such statistics, it's difficult to measure the effects of tariffs and policies, the group said. Regulators and consumers are dependent on figures provided by the GSM Association, which represents 700 mobile phone operators, the French group said. Those figures showed that the cost of making roaming calls in Europe fell by 25 percent in 2006, from â¬0.83 per minute to â¬0.62, the GSM Association said on Feb. 8. The price decline shows that regulation, especially of the retail market, is unnecessary, the Association said. In the absence of independent measurements of the market, BEUC and UFC - Que Choisir commissioned their own economic analysis in order to determine what they consider fair price caps. Limiting charges to â¬0.33 per minute will stimulate demand, and so have no adverse effect on operators' revenue or profit, they said. Based on mobile phone bills supplied by Members of the European Parliament, they calculated that lower charges could save MEPs an average over â¬1,000 each per year. European telecommunications ministers are expected to discuss the Commission's proposed regulations at informal meetings alongside the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, next month, while the European Parliament will vote on the proposals in April. Germany, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, has announced its intention to push the legislation on roaming prices through by the end of June, when its term of office ends. Â
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Basic cellphones line up for a Simplicity Derby, but are they efficient?
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Thanks to Vodafone's global size, it is now cheaper for Vodafone Sweden's business customers to work mobile while on business trips abroad and easier to manage the costs.
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Voice over IP calls are getting cheaper - Vonage and AT&amp;T both announced lower monthly charges late last week. AT&amp;T said it would reduce its monthly charge by five dollars to $30 a month for unlimited local and long distance calls in Canada and the US.
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These cell-phone boosters promise more stable calls, but how much improvement can consumers expect?
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AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint Nextel, look out! European companies with unfamiliar names to many Americans, now offer much cheaper and more convenient GSM cellular services to US residents traveling abroad.
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Will the carrier's call connect with consumers?
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Not quite the usual conference call.
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Direct dial phone calls from Ireland to 13 other countries are to be blocked because of an internet fraud. Hundreds of Irish phone users have run up large bills due to auto-dialling fraud or modem hijacking.
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New mobile devices allow users to make free or low-cost phone calls over the Internet using nearby wireless access points, which range from cafes to private homes.
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Rachel Parnes, who lives near Albany, N.Y., calls her mother in Natick almost daily, instead of weekly, because the price is so cheap. Kevin Clougherty of Chelmsford has friends in England on his speed-dial list. And Raj Sathyaraj of Hudson estimates he's saving $150 a month on calls to India and Australia since moving from AT&amp;T to Vonage Internet phone ...
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It&#39;s easy to be wowed by Japan&#39;s mobile communications infrastructure. &quot;Next-generation&quot; 3G coverage is now so ubiquitous that carriers have already stopped launching 2G phones; an impressive array of attractive handsets offer free digital TV; phones can be used to pay for goods and train rides, thanks to embedded contactless smart cards; and on the mobile information superhighway data whizzes along at 3.6Mbps. But watch out for the off-ramps.While Japan has led the world with many of the services offered to consumers, in some ways the mobile ecosystem here is downright backward as I found out last weekend when I tried to buy a new phone. A broken handset necessitated a new model and this is where my story begins.In Japan, phones are sold by carriers and not the phone makers. Companies like Fujitsu, NEC, Sony Ericsson, and a few foreign vendors including Nokia, Samsung, and LG sell their phones in the thousands to carriers. This gives carriers the ability to pretty much dictate to the phone maker what software needs to be installed.This model is one of the reasons that mobile Internet services like I-mode took off here so quickly. There was no chicken-and-egg situation with phone makers and users waiting for each other to take the plunge. NTT DoCoMo decided I-mode would be in new phones and so it was.But this model has a downside. Phones are so tightly customized to each carrier that it&#39;s not practical to keep the same handset when switching carriers, and if you see a phone you like you can only buy it if it&#39;s offered by your carrier.Back to my story. The new phone was looking quite expensive so I decided to switch carriers and take advantage of a free phone on a competitor network. Japan launched number portability a year ago, so I could make the jump without losing my cell-phone number. I&#39;d still have the hassle of a new e-mail address, but it appeared a small price to pay.Before long I had a new phone in my hands, but my phone numbers remained locked in the old handset. The new carrier didn&#39;t have a cable to hook up to my old phone so they couldn&#39;t transfer the address book and it wasn&#39;t possible to beam it between the phones. While my old carrier was gung-ho on Bluetooth, my new carrier wasn&#39;t so enthusiastic, so the new phone had no support. Similarly, while the new phone offered infrared, the old phone didn&#39;t. Heavy customization strikes again.Back home I fired up my PC and managed to get my address book from the old phone into the computer. Getting it to the new phone via a memory card seemed like an easy task ... but no! The VCard file wasn&#39;t being properly read by the new phone. Carriers, it was explained to me when I called the help line, often used custom fields in their VCards so there were sometimes problems. So much for a common standard.I won&#39;t bore you with the technicalities of how I eventually got my address book into my new phone, but suffice to say this story has a happy ending. I&#39;m now back in cruise control, enjoying all the attractions the mobile superhighway has to offer.The number portability system that enabled me to keep my phone number is coincidentally one-year-old this week. About 3 percent of users in Japan -- roughly 3.7 million people -- have made use of the system during its first year -- far less than the industry predicted, or feared.One thing that&#39;s said to be stopping users from switching is the inability to keep their e-mail addresses. While carriers fussed over the details of keeping numbers, they forgot, or perhaps ignored, the need to carry e-mail addresses between carriers. In other countries this wouldn&#39;t be a big deal because most messaging is done via SMS, which relies on phone numbers, but in Japan the advanced stage of the market has again caused hassle for consumers.