STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- Rebtel Networks AB is calling for European Union (EU) ministers to abandon efforts to get mobile telecom carriers to slash roaming charges. Instead, Rebtel recommends EU ministers encourage constituents to buy local pre-paid SIM cards when abroad, and use Rebtel's REBin service to make unlimited international calls for a 1 USD-per-week service fee, charged only in weeks when calls are made.

"Rebtel was designed for making super low-cost international calls from where you live -- however, with pre-paid SIM cards you can use Rebtel to solve the roaming problem, too," said Hjalmar Winbladh, Rebtel's president and CEO.

To get started, people sign up for a Rebtel account at www.rebtel.com, where they enter their mobile phone number (or SIM card number), and the mobile phone numbers of friends abroad. Rebtel then instantly creates pairs of local numbers and sends them in text messages so they can be saved in the friends' phone address books and used to call each other from then on.

For example, a person from Paris visiting London, who has purchased a pre-paid SIM card, gets a local London number for calling a friend in Paris, and their friend back home in Paris gets a local Paris number for reaching them while in London.

Once set up, Rebtel charges 1 USD per week (only in weeks calls are made) for use of two services: REBin and REBout.

With REBout, people use local numbers to call anywhere in the world and only pay for the local call, plus a small per-minute fee to Rebtel.

But for those who think that's too expensive Rebtel offers REBin, where the user's local call is connected with their global friend's local call in a virtual room on the Internet, called a REBroom. In a REBroom, all international minutes are free.

To get to a REBroom, the person who receives the call hangs up and calls back on the local number they've been given for their friend, while the caller stays on the line.

With REBin, no matter how many calls, how often or how long, there are no additional charges over Rebtel's service fee and the cost of the local calls.

Rebtel Networks AB