The cost with RebOut, ie. when you don’t ask the other person to call you back, depends on your local call rate and the country you are calling to. The savings in this case can still be significant, particularly when you are calling from a mobile phone.

I live in Europe; if I’m calling a mobile number in Japan or Austrialia from my mobile, for example, I would pay about 0.20 euro for the local call plus 0.20 euro to Rebtel, compared to the 1.05 euro per minute rate of my mobile operator. A 60% saving!

To me the real disadvantage of the service is the limited amount of numbers you can call and having to provide them in advance.

In the Spanish model we discussed on the phone, if I call my Spanish friends’ mobile and I don’t ask my friends to call me back, then I pay for the local call at this end and I pay Rebtel 22c per minute for their end.

This isn’t a significant saving over existing models.

“In essence, what you do with Rebtel’s service is register your numbers (mobile, landline, etc.) on their site, register the numbers of people you want to contact who are living abroad, Rebtel then generates local numbers for you and your contacts. You call your contact and instruct them to hang up and call you back on the local number you just appeared to call them from - then Rebtel connects the two local calls at no charge (other than the $1 per month you pay Rebtel and the local call charges).”

I’m still explaining the basics of Google to my mother, so to introduce this to an end-user with low IT skills would be a total nightmare. There are too many steps that assume a certain level of competence with telecoms and IT. When I call family or friends from the UK to Ireland, they expect a conversation, not a challenge. If Rebtel could drop two steps from their model, or modify it to allow for people to use familiar numbers (they’re all unique, it can’t be that hard?) then that could be a winner.

As it stands, its too much for a mass audience.