March 4th, 2008
Truphone cuts international rates with new Tru Zone offering
Today, Wi-Fi centered mobile Internet service provider Truphone announced a pretty significant per-minute calling cost reduction on calls from the U.S. to 40 countries.
Marketed as Tru Zone, these calls will be USD0.06 per minute to landlines and USD0.30 per minute.
The 40 countries in the “Tru Zone” include most EU countries, as well as Australia, Japan and Russia.
Calls to other nations, China, Hong Kong, U.S. and Canada - will cost even less, at just USD0.06 per minute to both landlines and mobiles.
Truphone likes to compare these rates to those of standard wireless plans. They cite the cost of a Verizon Wireless call to Germany without an international calling plan to be as much as $1.49 per minute for a landline call or $1.68 per minute for a mobile call.
Truphone CEO James Tagg (bad pub alert: “telephone Tagg”) is not reticent to plug the win-win of “Tru Zone.”
“People don’t know how much they’ll be charged to make a mobile call to friends abroad or to call back home from holiday. But they do know it’s expensive,” Tagg said in a statement “We’ve made it simple for customers by eliminating roaming charges. Now they can pay the same low price to make a call, wherever they are in the world.
“Wi-Fi and the Internet, which we use to carry our customers’ calls, is almost everywhere,” he added. ?Those on holiday, expatriates, migrant workers, business people, anyone with friends, family or colleagues in a different country… they can all now sidestep high international roaming fees. People should be hanging up on roaming charges, not be hung up on them.”
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
