Cut your iPhone call costs by 50 percent - with callback

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 28 June 2009 11:31

Business IT - Technology

A small Australian company, BigTinCan, has developed an application for the iPhone, Windows, BlackBerry and Android smartphones that enables users to easily make cheap calls to other Australian, fixed and mobile numbers and to overseas numbers. It claims that users can save up to 50 percent of call and messaging costs.

Rates quoted by BigTinCan are $0.30 per minute to Australian fixed and mobile numbers, SMS at $0.10 and MMS at $0.10. All calls are charged in one second increments and there is no flagfall. These same rates apply to international calls to the usual list of "top 20 countries, and another 25 as well. Customers pre-pay using a credit card over the web and choose a top up amount.

BigTinCan achieves its low prices using an updated version of a 20 year old technique known as callback. By effectively diverting the customer's from their mobile into the BigTinCan network, calling them back and using their dialled number to connect them to their intended destination.

For a few years in the early nineties fixed network callback flourished making some of its promoters millions of dollars and offering international callers significantly lower rates than standard international direct dial.

The technique exploited significant asymmetries in IDD rates: it was generally much cheaper to call other countries from the USA than to call the USA, or elsewhere, from that country. So callback operators installed technology in the US that would take an incoming call from overseas, then call the caller back and connected them to their ultimate destination all at US rates, plus of course a commission.

BigTinCan has updated the technique for the mobile era, essentially to exploit the fact that calls to overseas and Australian fixed line numbers are much cheaper from fixed lines than mobiles, but it is also able to exploit cheap wholesale rates for calls to mobile numbers.

According to managing director, David Keane, the process is seamless for users and the only difference they notice is a few seconds delay in call connection. To provide its connectivity BigTinCan is a wholesale service provider on the Optus network.

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