mig33 revives callback for the VoIP and mobile era

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 29 August 2006 10:21

Business IT - Technology

Callback flourished in the late 80s and early 90s when there was a huge imbalance between the costs of an international call depending on which country originated the call. Now an Australian company has revived the concept to bypass the high cost of international mobile roaming charges, and of international calls from mobile phones.
In essence the service is extremely simple. Users sign up and prepay credit into their account. Then, when they want to make an international call between any two numbers (which can be fixed or mobile) they simply send an SMS with the two numbers into mig33's server. It then rings both numbers to set up the call. Users must have a java-enabled mobile phone and must first download some client software.

The service was launched in December 2005 and now claims to have attracted more than one million users from more than 200 countries through its mig33 mobile (http://wap.mig33.com) and Internet web pages (http://www.mig33.com). It also offers free instant messaging to other mig33 users and to MSN Messenger & Yahoo Messenger users, and SMS to any destination at $A0.10.

mig33 is a subsidiary of Project Goth Pty Ltd a private Australian company founded in 2003 by Ms Mei Lin Ng and Steven Goh, formerly of online broking company Sanford Ltd (www.sanford.com.au).

According to Ng, "Every day, mig33 users are sending several million messages over our mobile Chat and SMS services, and placing tens of thousands of phone calls through our global VoIP network with calls being connected through our infrastructure in Australia, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and the USA."

Users can sign up direct for the mig33 service via its website, but it is also sold through affiliates. "We are expanding our affiliate network to grow partners in more and more countries, Ng said. "Affiliates buy credits in bulk and resell these credits in smaller denominations. Credits are usually resold in the form of prepaid vouchers and prepaid cards, locally in an affiliate's country. This enables the many users who may not have access to credit card and electronic forms of payments, to have access to cheap mobile VOIP using mig33."

Project Goth says it "continues to progress discussions with interested parties to form partnerships for mig33, including network operators, prepaid card vendors and content providers in varies countries," and has "significant plans to grow the mig33 business into the corporate and SME market.