Rebtel to the rescue?

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Anyone following the shenanigans I’ve had with Vodafone will probably know by now that I finally managed to sort out the accounting issue earlier today. An entire morning of my life wasted with more calls. One of 48 mins that went nowhere other than to confirm I owed the princely sum of €88. The second of 24 mins to figure out a way to pay this amount while outside the billing cycle. Eventually it got done by giving them the number of my Spanish bank debit card. How does 48 +24 = a while morning? Silly me.

Having made the first call and needing to find a way of settling the account, it struck me the best way would be to go to the local Vodafone shop, get them to access the account and fork over the cash. Local means 25km away. And parking in a Spanish town is anything but easy. Even then, nothing is that simple or obvious. We were handed a piece of paper, told to go to the local Banco Santander and deal with it there. The local shop can’t accept payments. As we strolled up the street – this is not a big town – I am thinking, ‘I’m still not sure exactly how much they want from me.’ That’s where the second call comes in.

By this stage we were sitting in a bar, me with coffee, Jude with water entertaining everyone with Vodafone’s muzak while the battery drained on my mobile. The problem went away…eventually. Yet another example of someone not having the precise instructions or means with which to deal with something since this had taken three calls and bucket loads of frustration. I cannot be the only person that’s got caught out in this way. The service we’ve been trying to use has been around several years. Vodafone Spain relies on its ex-pat Brit community to buy into the brand. And yet here we have a process that is badly broken. I could write the process flows required in about 30 minutes so why can’t this multi-billion pound company sort out something as simple as this? I know the answer but it’s not repeatable without the risk of libeling them.

At this stage I just want rid of these muthas. But would that make any real sense? They’ve managed to cream my bank account of €209 in 5 weeks that despite supposedly having a ‘cheaper’ system. Even if I swap back to Telefonica will I fare any better? Possibly, possibly not. But I still need to keep communications costs down so what to do?

I’d assumed that Europa Network would be able to help. I’ve used them for years but despite what I was told a few weeks ago, they’ve not picked up the calls since the line was transferred to Vodafone. Sneeky ol’ Vodafone. Adding the pre-dialing prefix each time to re-route calls is a PITA. I might still do that.I was paying them on average something around €40/month. Not bad and way better than what I’ve just been shafted by Vodafone.

An alternative is to use Rebtel. This comes recommended by Tom Raftery. You enter numbers into their screen and they in turn convert these to a local dial-in call. You pay the local dial-in call rate plus whatever it is they are charging. When making the call, you need to enter your phone number (why don’t they recognize it automatically) and then enter a PIN number (duh?) but costs are low. A 14 minute call back to the UK cost 10¢ – about 7p. I can definitely live with that. I can deposit using PayPal. That works well for me too. Line and voice quality seem OK. It’s just a pain having to enter extra information. I can also attach my mobile number to the account so increase savings there as well. Given 90% of my calls are to overseas numbers this could work out to be a major cost saver.

Anyhoo – for the time being – i.e. the next month or so, I’m going to stick with what I’m doing and see how the overall costs work out. Skype is still my standby friend. I make extensive use of it for conferencing with colleagues. The one bugbear is in calling to conference lines organized by others that have to be terminated with a Spanish number. It’s always a hit and miss affair.

All of this could be avoided if the big telcos took their heads out of their collective arses and just offered a better, low cost service in the first place.

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Tagged as: Rebtel, Skype, Spain, Telecommunications, telefonica, Telephone number, Vodafone, vodafone spain