It's amazing the way the Internet keeps toppling traditional businesses. Telegrams have gone away. Music CD sales are tanking. Newspapers are hurting.
One especially lucrative business, however, has somehow escaped the Internet's notice so far: international cell phone calls.
That's about to change. Early next month, a small company called Cubic Telecom will release what it is calling the first global mobile phone.
But first, some background. Cell phones from T-Mobile and AT&T rely on the same type of network (called GSM) that most of the rest of the world uses. In theory, then, you can take these phones to other countries and make calls as usual. (Most Verizon and Sprint phones work only in the United States.)
Unfortunately, international roaming runs from $1 to $5 a minute. A 20-minute call home from the Bahamas on a T-Mobile phone will set you back $60. The same call home from Russia on an AT&T cell phone will cost a cool $100.
Sure, you could always rent a phone or use a phone card when you travel--but then nobody knows how to reach you.
It costs a lot to dial overseas from here, too. Verizon charges $1.50 a minute for calls to most countries. AT&T's rates can be truly Dr. Seussian--like $2.52 to Greece, $2.80 to Iraq and $3.65 to Australia. That's per minute. Make one 20-minute call to New Zealand, and you owe $75 to AT&T.
Now, most carriers offer special international plans: you pay more a month, you get slightly lower roaming rates. But even they can't touch the appeal of Cubic's cell phone. It makes calls to or from any of 214 countries--for 50 percent to 90 percent off what the big carriers would charge.
On this phone, a 20-minute call from the Bahamas costs $5.80 (that's 90 percent off T-Mobile's rate). The Cubic price from Russia is 49 cents a minute (90 percent lower than AT&T).
And there's no monthly fee and no commitment for any of this. It works like a prepaid phone, where you put some money in your account and use it up as you talk.
At this point, the appropriate world traveler's response ought to be involuntary drooling, but there's more to the story. Most of it is more good news, but also more complexity.
For example, consider this: at the MaxRoam.com site from Cubic, you can request local phone numbers in up to 50 cities at no charge. Now you can have a Paris number, a London number and a Mexico City number that your friends overseas can use to call your cell phone.
No longer must you hand out a series of international phone numbers for each trip you make, or expect your colleagues in the United States to pay $50 a pop to reach you.
Cubic points out that this feature alone is a life-changer for people who have moved, for example, to the United States from overseas. Their family back home can keep in touch for the price of a local call.
I signed up for numbers in Paris, London and Barcelona, and then asked friends in those cities to call me. They dialed local numbers, and my phone rang in New York--very slick. Voice quality was typical of Internet calls: perfectly understandable, but slightly muffled, with a quarter-second to one-second voice delay.
Even that's not the end of this phone's possibilities. For a flat $42 a month, you can turn on its unlimited Wi-Fi calling option. It lets you receive unlimited unmetered calls to any number in the world from Internet hot spots, or make them for a penny a minute. Either way, you have little fear of racking up your bill.
This works on hot spots that require a password, but not ones that require a Web page log-in. And in contrast to the new HotSpot@Home phones from T-Mobile, which seamlessly hand off calls between Wi-Fi and the cellular network as you move, the Cubic phone drops the call when you leave the hot spot.
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