Pat Phelan of Cubic Telecom, and Roam4Free fame is off in Vancouver at the moment and he sent back for news from the coalface.
Cubic Telecom and Celtrak Global Roaming are joining technical and logistic forces to release new services to overcome the monoply traditional mobile operators have had in the roaming/long-distance calling business since the inception of mobile phones.
These new services will offer significant savings to those who are currently paying a fortune for International roaming.
Pat’s mantra is “a world where anyone can call anyone at anytime without worrying about the cost”, and in todays world of “blah blah” talk, its a pretty good one.
CelTrak seem to compliment Cubic Telecom’s business well. They offer 3 basic packages, combing in different ways cellphone, SIM card, and call credit.
CelTrak then also offer instant onair top-up, which effectively means that instead of having to get a pin to top your phone up with, your credit is automatically increased over-the-air. Nice and simple.
CelTrak’s SIM works in any GSM phone. CelTrak has over 700 GSM roaming agreements with mobile operators all over the world, which gets them competitive roaming rates in different international locations. These romaing rates offer between 50-90% savings over normal rates.
A question to ask is, why are other companies not seeing the possible benefits to be made by striking roaming deals with mobile operators?
CelTraks ambition is “of offering low-cost roaming to consumers everywhere”, which sounds pretty much like Pat’s mantra!
CelTrak have views of also offering data services for roamers, another area which is a lucrative cash-cow for cellphone operators.
It looks like Cubic Telecom get some good benefits from CelTrak, like the roaming agreements, while CelTrak also get good benefits from Cubic, like the good foothold in Europe, and the MaxRoam SIM products.
For me, if they were able to offer a VoIP service in the form of a software application, this would make a big difference to me.
I am interested in seeing their virtual PBX service, a service that CelTrak seem to have on offer also.
My current VoIP provider, Blueface, also have a virtual PBX, which is also a nice feature.
Congrats Pat, hope to hear more news soon!
[tags] cubic telecom , celtrak , voip , mobile phones , cell operators , telecomms , pat phelan [/tags]
