New Year’s Day traditionally sees the daily volume of mobile phone text greetings spike worldwide, to volumes that range between hundreds of millions, to billions of text messages per country according to the UK’s Mobile Data Association.
A large proportion of the mobile industry’s estimated revenues of over 1 Trillion Dollars per annum come from this spike in traffic – often at a heavy cost to consumers who feel pressured to send, or respond to, texts from friends and family.
To cater for this, specialised mobile provider Webtel.mobi launched a cost-cutting mobile texting product in November 2008, to provide consumers with a low-cost alternative which would allow them to send the same number of texts, but at a fraction of standard costs.
Uniquely, Webtel.mobi’s product works off consumers’ own mobile phones, and texts are sent using the sender’s own mobile phone and number.
As a comparison, the standard cost for sending a standard 160 character text can cost anything from 15 cents to two Dollars – depending on whether it’s sent locally or internationally.
Webtel.mobi’s texting cost averages between 4 to 9 cents per text – for both local and international texts. Other than this, the Webtel.mobi platform allows consumers to send text messages while roaming – without incurring roaming fees.
According to a spokesman for Webtel.mobi “We cater for all three primary categories of text message sending – local texts, international texts and roaming texts. For all of these sectors we can cut the cost of texting by up to 80%, and for international and roaming texts, we can cut the costs by a lot more – often more than 90%”.
“We’ve also made our platform very easy to use, and users can sign up for free and don’t have to take out any contract. They just top up their accounts online with PayPal for as much texting credit as they want to use”.
The Webtel.mobi platform records all texts sent and the cost per text, so users can access their history at any time, and also see how much credit has been used and how much is remaining.
The Webtel.mobi system is available in all countries from all web-enabled mobile phones, at http://www.webtel.mobi
A desktop Help / FAQ site can be accessed via PC or laptop at http://www.webtel.mobi/pc
A video on Webtel.mobi has also been uploaded to YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiheLVVE5qw
Telecoms analyst Saverio Romeo of Frost & Sullivan predicts that Webtel.mobi’s low costs will have a market-wide effect in bringing down mobile costs in the future.
For now, Webtel.mobi’s service is set to make it a Happy New Year for consumers - who get to send the same number of texts, but keep up to 80% of the money they’d usually use for sending them in their own wallets.
