Make Very Cheap Calls From Your Mobile Phone with Jaxtr

A couple of months ago, during one of my stay in California, I wrote a blog post about the best choices to make cheap international calls through your mobile phone, since I needed to find the best solution for myself in order to call home in Italy. Rebtel turned out to be the best solution for me so I kept using it every time I went back to the Bay Area.

Yesterday I came across the new solution just launched my Jaxtr. The philosophy is pretty much the same used by Rebtel itself: you provide them your phone number plus the number you want to call then they give you a local number to dial in order to get connected to the other party. Jaxtr uses what I call the “conference bridge” approach, that means the person you want to cal must call another local number in order to be connected with you.

Generally speaking, I don’t like this approach that much. It’s far from being usable and, in addition, the person you are calling is notified with an SMS which informs that a number must be called back (and this message is not in the native language of the person you are calling). Lots of barriers here for a wide adoption of a service like this.

Rebtel offers the same approach too, but they also give you the ability to assign local numbers to all your contacts, upload these contacts to your mobile phone address book and call your contacts by just dialing that number. Their phone will ring normally and they don’t have to call back. For this reason I just bought a prepaid SIM card from T-Mobile and started calling my contacts by just dialing a local +1 415 phone number.

All that being said, I’m not saying that the new Jaxtr service is not worth a look. For a limited number of contacts and for well defined situations (like a student calling friends and family while studying abroad) you can easily manage, this solution works well and it is very cheap. Not free, though. It would be free if you’d just need to call a toll free number, without any cost but, except for the US, that call is not going to be free (not for you neither for the contact you are calling).

In conclusion, if you are looking for a cheap way to call home during your trips around the world, Jaxtr is definitely another solution to look at. From their standpoint, it’s likely the latest attempt to grow their user base quickly with the aim, for their investors, to find a way to finally exit, before the 18 months end. From my standpoint, they still need to find a set of unique features / a different business model which can let them stand out of the crowd of similar services, something players like Jajah already did (see the difference down here…).

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