Today, I had the chance to catch up with Hjalmar, who's in the Bay Area for a 3 days visit from Sweden. Inspite Rebtel's CEO excitement about the upcoming news planned for next month, he was very "light" on details. Personally, I use Rebtel almost everyday to call Europe and Japan. While I found the quality of the RebOut call-out service to be good, the free RebIn is a bit spotty at best. But it's free... so you get pretty much get what you paid for. But according to Hjalmar, Rebtel is working on improving it's network by adding more "hubs" to minimise the number of hops a call needs to go through, limiting the jitter and echos. Part of the upcoming features include a way to add a new "friend" on your Rebtel address book using your cell phone instead of through the PC; and an auto-redirection of the outgoing call through the Wi-Fi or the cell network, whatever cheapest network your mobile is connected to.

Rebtel also plans to change its pricing model to better reflect the usage patterns of its users.

We can not charge the same amount to a private investment banker in the UK who's saving 4-6 K pounds a year using Rebtel, and who thinks a dollar for every week he uses our service is a joke, and the nanny in northern Norway who calls back to the Philippines 5 minutes a day from her prepaid SIM card and gets hit by that dollar a week

So expect to see several pricing schemes with a cheaper version without the dollar a week thing. Another interesting data is that the time of a conversation on Rebtel is on average 12 minutes.

Which is unheard of in the mobile space where the average is less than a 2 minutes

. Hjalmar mentioned some other interesting users cases like the expats in the UK calling back home or the executive using Rebtel as a conference bridge to listen-in to a conference call on his cell phone on the way home instead of having to stay in the office. Finally, Rebtel is expanding its footprint to now include Austria and Greece, adding new offices in London and the Bay Area, and reaching 30 employees versus 12 people less than six months ago.