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Pingo Offers Customers Free Calling To China And Vietnam During Chinese New Year CelebrationFebruary 14, 2007
Subscribers Get Fifteen Days of Free and Reduced-Rate Calling From Regular Phones During Annual Spring Festival BURLINGTON, Mass. – (U.S. ASIAN WIRE) -- Pingo® (www.pingo.com), the online prepaid calling card service of iBasis (NASDAQ: IBAS), today announced it’s offering subscribers free calls to China and Vietnam from February 18 through March 4, 2007, to celebrate the Lunar New Year Festival season. Also known as Chinese New Year and the Spring Festival, the fifteen day period annually prompts the largest volume of travel and long-distance calling to those countries as Chinese and Vietnamese people worldwide honor the holiday’s traditional emphasis on family gatherings. Pingo calls are carried over The iBasis Network™ -- the most extensive international Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) network in existence – directly serving more than 100 countries and enabling customers to enjoy the cost-savings of Internet telephony while using regular fixed and mobile phones. “Pingo can help families separated by many miles to stay close throughout the year by enabling them to call more often and talk longer,” said Ofer Gneezy, president and CEO of iBasis. “Because of the efficiency of our network and our buying power as a leading wholesale carrier, we’re able to offer this special incentive to encourage those with family in China or Vietnam to join them for the holidays, at least over the phone, and then continue saving with Pingo.” Pingo customers in the U.S. can use Pingo’s local access numbers to call landline phones in China and Vietnam for free from February 18 through March 4. Customers using Pingo’s toll-free access, which is available in 35 countries (including the U.S.), or calling mobile phones in China and Vietnam, will incur a nominal surcharge. Available worldwide via credit card or PayPal exclusively through its multi-lingual website, Pingo’s calling card is a truly international product. Consumers can reach the Pingo platform and save on calls from 35 countries, view rates in more than 38 currencies, and make payments in four currencies. Pingo’s voice prompts are in five languages (English, Spanish, French, Chinese and Portuguese). Pingo online calling card also provides easy-to-use features such as PINpass™ PIN-less dialing, on-line call history reporting, and automatic recharging. A Refer-a-Friend program also offers customers a $5 bonus when someone they refer joins the service. Pingo users also benefit from the service’s unique RateWatcher™ feature, by which iBasis continually seeks opportunities to lower its costs of international termination and pass the savings on to its Pingo international calling card customers. For example, in October of 2006, RateWatcher enabled Pingo to reduce calling rates to 125 countries by as much as 30 percent, and in January reduced rates to the Philippines, helping to make Pingo “the last calling card you’ll ever need.” iBasis, the Global VoIP company™, is one of the world's leading wholesale carriers of international long distance telephone calls. Based on Telegeography projections and iBasis’ current annual run rate of approximately 12 billion minutes of traffic, the company carries an estimated 20 percent of the world’s international VoIP traffic2. Record traffic periods, which regularly occur during major religious and national holidays such as Christmas, New Year’s, Mothers’ Day, Ramadan, Eid, Diwali, and Chinese New Year, demonstrate the scalability of The iBasis Network. Phone traffic over the iBasis network on these holidays typically increases by 30 percent or more over non-holiday traffic.
About Pingo
About iBasis
1 Telegeography 2006 iBasis and Pingo are registered marks, The iBasis Network and the global VoIP company are trademarks of iBasis, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Except for historical information, all of the expectations, plans and assumptions contained in the foregoing press release constitute forward-looking statements under Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and involve risks and uncertainties. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from such forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, (i) the Company's ability to execute its business plan; (ii) the extent of adoption of the Company's services and the timing and amount of revenue and gross profit generated by these services; (iii) fluctuations in the market for and pricing of these services; (iv) the other factors described in the Company's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for its most recently completed fiscal quarter and Annual Report on Form 10-K for its most recently completed fiscal year all of which are available at http://www.sec.gov. Such forward-looking statements are only as of the date they are made, and we have no current intention to update any forward-looking statements. Contacts:
Chris Ward
Marty Querzoli |
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