SunPage offers mobile calls at under 6 cents

Kewl. Somebody figured out how to arbitrage free incoming mobile phone calls!

Business Times - 21 Jun 2005

SunPage offers mobile calls at under 6 cents

By ROLAND LIM

MOBILE phone users are being offered a new service which allows them to make calls at 5.9 cents per minute, compared to the 10 to 21 cents charged by conventional mobile operators.

The service, called Budget MobileCall or BMC, was launched yesterday by SunPage Communications, a subsidiary of mainboard-listed TeleChoice International.

The system involves a user ringing and then being called back, so it takes around seven seconds to make a connection, rather than the usual two seconds.

BMC only benefits users with a mobile phone plan which has free incoming calls.

This is still a big market, according to Clive Lim, president of TeleChoice, who estimates that 'about 40 per cent of the post-paid market, or about a million subscribers, have mobile phone plans with free incoming calls'.

He said yesterday: 'We are targeting a different market from the major telcos, and are going after the lower-end, budget conscious market.'

SunPage currently has 85,000 subscribers registered with its post-paid international direct dialling (IDD) service, who will automatically be registered for this service.

'We aim to add up to 20,000 new subscribers for BMC by the end of this year,' said Danny Lai, managing director of ST SunPage. BMC subscribers will be billed separately from their respective mobile operator charges, on a per-minute basis.

'We also aim to achieve three million minutes per month by the end of the year, and 10 million minutes per month by the end of next year,' Mr Lai said.

For its first fiscal quarter ended March 31, TeleChoice reported revenues of $125 million, up 4 per cent from the same period last year.

Of this, $6.6 million, or about 5 per cent, came from its telecommunications services division, SunPage.

At three million minutes per month, SunPage's new service could add about half a million dollars to quarterly revenue.

The system works by the BMC subscriber dialling '15210', followed by the local number required.

This connects the user to SunPage's system where there will be a beeping tone and the call will be terminated.

There is no charge for this call as the system does not pick up the call.

A few seconds later, the system will call the user back, and upon answering, he or she will be connected to the dialled party.

Since last year, a few companies such as iCentel and OSMS International have offered similar products which allow mobile phone users to make calls at about five cents per minute using a similar call-back system.

Most of these offerings are based on pre-paid cards distributed using a multi-level marketing model.