Archive for November, 2009

Five Days of Free Calls to the USA for Thanksgiving

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

As of midnight this morning Eastern Time (5am GMT) all calls to United States landlines and mobiles will be completely free for five days, for all Localphone users new and old.

You can talk for as long as you want, to as many people as you want, any time you want, and we won’t charge you a penny.

Call from your landline or mobile with Direct Dial or Calling Card, or from your PC, iPhone, or other VoIP-enabled mobile with Localphone VoIP.

This offer even applies to our Incoming Numbers service. Buy a number in any of our 46 Incoming Number countries and forward calls to a landline or mobile in the US for free for five days.

We hope this offer will help you keep in touch with your loved ones this Thanksgiving.

This promotion will run until 10am GMT on Monday 30th November. For full details please see “Free Calls to the USA for Thanksgiving”.

SMS Forwarding on UK Incoming Numbers

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

Please note that this feature is currently only available on our UK Incoming Numbers, and only applies to SMS messages sent from a UK mobile network.

We have now enabled an exciting new feature on Localphone Incoming Numbers in the UK.

Available immediately, free of charge, when somebody sends an SMS text message to any of your UK Incoming Numbers it will be recorded in your SMS History.

You can also opt to have the SMS automatically forwarded to a number of your choosing—anywhere in the world—at our standard international SMS rates.

Just visit your Incoming Numbers Dashboard and click “Edit” next to your SMS-enabled number(s). On this page you’ll see a new “Forwarding Your SMS Messages” section where you can enable and disable this feature.

When you send SMS messages from the Localphone website you can choose your Incoming Number as the “Send From” field. When your friend in the UK replies, you can have it forwarded straight back to your mobile!

We hope you’ll enjoy this powerful new feature. We plan to start rolling it out to our Incoming Numbers in other countries soon.

Our Thoughts on Monthly Call Plans

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

Recently a few Localphone users have asked for our thoughts regarding the packages offered by some competing services, where customers pay a monthly fee and receive “unlimited” or a fixed number of minutes per month.

In our opinion these rarely offer good value for all but a relatively small number of the most heavy callers.

For example, here in the UK Vonage offers “V-Plan 4i”, advertising unlimited calls to India and others for £18.99 per month. We’ve found that a typical user calling India does so for about 400 minutes per month, giving an effective rate of 4.75p per minute (versus our current GBP rate to India from as little as 1.3p per minute).

To match our rate with Vonage you’d have to be calling for more than three times the average—almost 1,500 minutes per month!

Another common feature of these plans is a “fair usage policy” which can really sting those users that do make significantly higher numbers of calls. In Vonage’s case their fair usage policy limits their “unlimited” package to 2,000 minutes per month.

For those few users who do fall in this 1,500 to 2,000 minutes per month range we feel Localphone’s advanced features add enough value to be worth the small rate increase.

With Vonage you’re tied to using their hardware (with up to £39.99 set-up costs), while Localphone lets you call from your existing landline or mobile, or from your broadband or mobile Internet connection with Localphone VoIP. You can also send cheap international SMS messages, or even get an Incoming Number in your destination countries so friends and family can call you back.

As I’m sure our customers will agree, Localphone’s per minute billing offers significantly higher flexibility and value for money than competing package offers.

(information sourced from Vonage’s website on 23rd November, 2009)