Wadja And Rebtel: International Calls And SMS At Reasonable Prices

When I first got to Paris, I thought that calling and sending SMS to my friends and family back home would cost me the same as International calling and SMS usually cost me in Lebanon, until I got my contract and discovered the enormous prices of calling abroad. All my friends here advised me to get some International calling cards (not SIM cards), they are ones that look like a credit card but have a special phone number and some credit added to them. I had to find a phone booth each time I needed to use them, plus their credit rolled out pretty quickly. I bought one of these cards once and quickly realized that I wasn’t going to get a second one, that’s when Vlad Bobleanta suggested I try Rebtel.

Rebtel uses this awesome concept that I’m sure many other services also use (but I ended up on Rebtel, so I’m sticking to it): I give it my parents/friends phone number in Lebanon, be it a Mobile or a Fix telephone number, and it hands me back a local number here in France. When I need to call them, I simply dial this local number and Rebtel will take care of connecting the call back to Lebanon. Price varies depending on the country the call is originated from and the country the call is addressed to, but from Paris to Lebanon, it costs me 0.09EUR per minute to call a fixed line and 0.16EUR to call a mobile line. WAY below the 1.5 EUR that my operator charges, even if you add the fact that I’m still being deduced on my operator’s 2hour/month local calls allowance.

The best part about Rebtel is that it allows me to manage my contacts via its website, but also offers a mobile portal so I can manage my contacts on the go, as well as an SMS interface. This means that wherever I am, if I need to call an international number in Lebanon or elsewhere, I simply launch my browser, hit my Rebtel contacts page, add them, and boom, I receive an SMS with the new number from which I can instantly dial it. Practical. Way more practical than any phonebooth-requiring cards, plus I can add as much credit as I want to my account via PayPal.

So my phone calls problem was solved, but my messaging problem remained, and it was more important as I tend to use SMS more frequently than calls. So I spent countless hours on Google trying to find a service that allows me to send international SMS at a decent price until I stumbled on Wadja.

Wadja is a nice social communication portal offering tons of features that I have yet to explore, except for one feature that I’ve mastered. After signing in on Wadja, you can set out to compose messages, these are either email, SMS or SMS plus (which seems more like MMS to me). The cost? Nothing. Zilch. Zero. Free SMS sending from/to any country in the world. Pretty darn awesome! The best part, which is the one feature that matters to me the most, is that Wadja has a nice mobile site: m.wadja.com. I’ve signed in there and saved my Compose SMS page as a bookmark on my phone’s browser. This means that whenever I’m out, all I have to do to send a free international SMS is click on that bookmark from my phone, and compose the SMS. Even better is the fact that I can choose what my recipients see when they receive the SMS: my Wadja username or my phone number. I opt to use the phone number, which makes it easier for them to reply to me via usual SMS.

Of course there are limitations: an SMS is a maximum of 92 characters because Wadja adds a small sentence at the end saying that the SMS was sent using it, and I’m pretty sure that Wadja can’t send more than 4 or 5 free SMS per day (although I have yet to read about this anywhere on their site), but the fact that it works for casual SMS’ing, that it has a nice mobile website, and that it saves me 0.30EUR per SMS (price that my operator charges for international messaging) makes Wadja priceless in my opinion.

There you go: Rebtel and Wadja have been saving me tons of money ever since I moved to France. So make sure you pass them along, but whisper their names carefully. We don’t want operators finding out about them

Tags: Free, International calls, International SMS, Rebtel, Wadja