My conversation with Hjalmar Winbladh of Rebtel today was eye opening on how the EU mobile operators cartel (Vodaphone, Orange, T-Mobile...) are sucking money off of both their subscribers and the people/friends/family that are trying to reach them. For Hjalmar, the good news is that operators around the world are going to start offering large "bucket plans" including thousands of minutes of talking time, just like the US operators did several years ago. The reasoning behind this is plain simple: to accelerate the fixed to mobile convergence so they could charge everybody that calls you their outrageous "interconnection fee". And the faster this happens, the fatter will be their profits.

In the UK, Vodaphone has the right to charge 6 pences per minute for the next 3 years for the right to connect to their network. But then you need to go through wholesalers, that would add a 30% mark up to Vodaphone's fee, to buy those minutes of interconnection. You are now talking of 8p/mn that is the bare minimum wholesale price for me to provide the service to my customers. To put it in perspective, Vodaphone pays British Telecom 1/3 of a pence per minute for interconnecting into their network!

But wait, that's not all. On top of the subscription rate Vodaphone (and the other Russian ministries dixit Walt Mossberg of the WSJ) is charging its customers, the operator receives billions of dollars from all the fixed and international operators that are sending calls to the Vodaphone network.

If Vodaphone charges me 49 euros per month, they know they are going to earn an additional hidden revenue of maybe 30 euros on incoming calls to my number. But with Rebtel, we are decoupling these two, because when you use our free service RebIn, we do this interconnection on the Internet bypassing the mobile operators tax

Although this convergence "fixed to mobile" is inevitable and even happening as we write, I find that a voice on the Net service like Rebtel's is the solution today I know that can finally bypass the toll fee the EU operators are charging to the rest of us. My hope is there will be more other services like this.