Ubifone, Skype Free Internet Mobile Phone Calls War Begins
By Israel News Agency Staff
Jerusalem-----August 3 ......Ubifone, a global telecommunications company which has been offering both fixed and mobile free phone calls over the Internet, now has Skype in a panic.
"Ubifone was very proud to remind both our commercial and private free Internet telephone call clients two days ago of Ubifone's exclusive and free global mobile Internet phone call services," said Sam Kfir-El, executive agent for Ubifone. "Yesterday, Skype responded with an announcement offering, not their own service, but rather another company which has start-up mobile Internet phone call technology which must still rely on using a PC. Any senior marketing executive or university student who just finished Marketing 101, knows that you don't launch a business and or consumer product during August when people are on vacation, fishing, hiking or drinking beers by the beach. To rush into offering untested, beta, free mobile Internet phone services is irresponsible and those consumers who sign up for Skype's new "beta" mobile Internet phone service could expect to find an ocean of quicksand saturated with an abundance of technical bugs and poor voice quality."
Kfir-El adds: "Skype should stick do what they know best, offering free PC to PC Internet phone calls. They have created an excellent brand for themselves, but that name will quickly crash by providing poor mobile phone calls, Internet calls which could become disconnected or be interrupted by noise and other static. In addition, Skype has used their millions of customers as guinea pigs as they debugged their original free Internet phone service. They should not be putting these same good people back into a test laboratory with "beta" software. Lastly, to add insult to injury, Skype will now be asking these same people to pay a fee to take part in their market research."
The benefits of Ubifone over Skype and other traditional VoIP free Internet phone services are greatest for people and companies who regularly make international calls from and to mobile phones. The services use "voice over Internet protocol" (VoIP) technology that chops up speech into small packets of digital information and sends them over the Internet just like e-mails.
The disadvantage with Skype in comparison to Ubifone, and similar services offered by free Internet phone service providers such as Wanadoo, is that Internet phone calls have to be made from the computer and can only be received if the machine is left switched on.
With more than 45 million users, Skype has carved out a market by piggybacking on the world’s telephony networks. Skype is the largest of the VoIP suppliers. Skype users can call each other free of charge while calls between Skype users to people connected to public switched telephone networks cost less then 3 cents a minute over Skype features called SkypeOut and SkypeIn.
Other companies have evolved services that let customers use a real telephone connected to a box plugged into the home's broadband connection. BT Broadband Voice Service and Vonage, for instance, offer a broadband phone that bypasses the computer. They also charge a monthly subscription and give customers unlimited free Internet phone calls.
Some new Internet phone services also let customers choose several different phone numbers and dialling codes. So a company based in Germany could offer American customers a New York number to call, and Australians a number in Sydney. "For telecoms companies, it lowers the cost of transmitting the telephone call," Kfir-El said. "And it has more flexibility. So the kind of features that are common on mobile phones, such as voice mail and caller IT, will be easier on fixed lines.
"The growth of consumer Voip is taking some people by surprise but considering the cost benefits and the willingness of consumers to experiment, it's not that surprising." "UbiFone's MoVoIP solution connects its users via a portable plug and play device which acts as a ‘local base station' that the user calls into from their mobile phone," said Samuel Kfir-El, UbiFone executive agent for the US, Canada, South America, Brazil, Argentina, Europe, Holland, France, Russia, Poland, UK, Italy, Spain, Africa, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Egypt, India, Korea, China, Singapore, Japan, Australia and Asia.
"The ‘base station' is permanently connected to the Internet and when the base receives a call from the mobile or fixed line user it opens up a UbiFone VoIP line. The VoIP line then allows the user to call other UbiFone users for free and / or make calls to any PSTN or mobile phone in the world at UbiFone's super low rates." The ‘base station' is a pre-configured adapter that comes complete with a personal UbiFone account which allows the purchaser to take it out of the box and start making calls immediately. The adapter eliminates the need to use a computer to connect to a VoIP phone line as it is connected directly to the Internet and is not dependent on your PC been turned on, which is just one of the challenges with other solutions available in the market place today.
“Users of existing VoIP services need to physically sit in front of their PC's, have a Wi-Fi phone or an IP Phone connected to their Internet cable to make IP calls,” says Carlos H. Oestby , President and Co-Founder of UbiFone. “While these solutions are good and have a place, they are also restrictive. MoVoIP offers flexibility with less boundaries and that leads to enormous market potential for our MoVoIP technology and solutions.”
UbiFone's MoVoIP solutions incorporate a wide range of creative features and capabilities designed to enhance the end user experience when MoVoIP- ing including: forwarding your incoming UbiFone calls to any landline or a mobile phone, forwarding your landline or mobile phone number to your Ubi Virtual Number and connecting to your landline / fixed phone allowing it to make PSTN and IP phone calls.
“UbiFone is focused on providing its members with the freedom to make Internet phone calls from multiple devices, wherever and whenever they desire, free (among members) and at the lowest possible rates. We are very excited to bring MoVoIP to the world as we can see many mobile phone users utilizing this new technology which in turn will force mobile phone operators to reconsider their international billing strategies” says John E. Acland, CEO and Co-Founder of UbiFone. “VOIP is changing the way people make phone calls from the home PC, MoVoIP goes further by revolutionizing the way people make calls from their mobile phones.”
UbiFone offers affordable and cheap customer packages starting from as little as $9.95 USD which includes $5 in air time and a one time set-up fee of $4.95. Users can then top up their accounts as and when they need to make calls to cellular / mobile and fixed landline phones, in addition to also enjoying free and unlimited incoming and outgoing calls to other UbiFone users with call forwarding capabilities and no monthly charges.
"Unfortunately, essentially all the totally free PC to phone services have disappeared but Ubifone does offer free Internet phone service for its members," said Kfir-El. "Free calling from one PC to another on the Internet has been around for quite some time, but now you can make calls to standard telephones for free. PC to PC calling has its share of drawbacks. The person you are calling not only needs to be online they need to be running the same Internet phone software you are."
"Ubifone addresses this problem with its MoVoIP. The sound quality of your Internet phone call was dependent on your connection speed and the other person's connection speed. If the connection is slow or there is a lot of traffic at just one end it may be impossible to hold a conversation. On the other hand when you use Ubifone that allows you to initiate your Internet phone call from your PC but call standard telephones you are the only one that needs a special setup," said Kfir-El.
Internet phone services let you communicate in a number of ways. You can make an Internet phone call from one PC to another by dialing the Internet Protocol address of your friend's computer. The software lets you type in the digits of the IP address, and you start talking. After years of unfulfilled hype, Ubifone is offering free and low cost Internet telephone calls, in which voice data from phone calls is broken up into packets and sent across the Internet. In response, more individuals and companies have begun using the technology.
The Yankee Group, a market research firm, predicts rapid growth in the US Internet telephony market. A recent report by the Yankee Group, a market research firm, predicts the US consumer Internet telephony market will explode from 130,000 subscribers at the end of 2003 to 17.5 million subscribers in 2008. Now, Ubifone is offering wireless Internet telephony, which adds convenience by letting users make Internet calls from their mobile phones via IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) wireless LAN and third-generation (3G) cellular technologies.
With wireless-phone usage outstripping wired-phone usage, this represents a potentially huge market for developers, explained Mareca Hatler, research director with ON World, a wireless-technology consultancy. As is the case with its wired Internet telephony, wireless Internet telephony is less expensive than regular mobile telephony because carriers can use the existing Internet, rather than build a new infrastructure, to route calls. In addition, Internet telephony is not subject to the regulation and fees that governments impose on traditional telephony.
Using the Internet enables wireless telephony to offer good reception indoors, which is not always the case with traditional cellular service. However, despite rosy marketplace-growth projections, Internet telephony faces several important concerns, particularly power usage, security, and quality of service (QoS). UbiFone is a US company based in Nevada with its management and customer support division located in Singapore, the hub of South East Asia. The company is in the process of opening another office which will be fully operational in the 3rd Quarter of 2005 and is expected to launch its services in India this summer.
UbiFone provides state of the art communications solutions to members in over 150 countries. UbiFone's global community of members can receive and initiate calls to and from multiple devices such as PC's, MAC'S, IP Phones, Cellular/Mobiles, Fixed Landline Phones and PDA'S. The company's One World - One Community - One Number concept is catching on fast as more and more people are searching for genuine savings, reliability and flexibility with crystal clear call quality.
For more information please contact Samuel Kfir-El at tel. number 972-547644545 or email: uninumber@gmail.com.