gotalk says it has launched a national campaign to promote its new mobile service to the estimated 5.5 million people in Australia who were born or have at least one parent born overseas – a sector it claims has been neglected by the major mobile carriers.
“Using the Vodafone 3G network infrastructure, the new gotalk mobile service does not require long term contracts, is available on prepaid or a monthly account, and also comes with a number of innovative mobile telecommunications firsts,” CEO Steve Picton said
Picton said that gotalk’s “highly competitive” international rates would be combined with low charges for calls and SMS to Australian numbers – “which will appeal to all mobile users, not just the ethnic market…For example, on our Straight Talk plan, customers can call for only 20c per minute (plus flagfall) to Australian landlines or mobiles and SMS for 12.5c.”
“gotalk mobile will be Australia’s first mobile service to allow customers to make calls from their home phone or other fixed line, using their mobile credit, making it much more convenient than existing services in the market.”
gotalk claims that its mobile service will also be Australia’s first prepaid mobile product that can be topped up via an electronic swipe card – available at over 10,000 outlets across Australia – without entering complicated PIN numbers.
gotalk recently signed an agreement with the India’s Tata Communications, one of the world’s largest global communications organisations, under which it will outsource routing of all its overseas voice traffic to Tata. Tata will install an international gateway switch in Sydney to handle the gotalk traffic. Tata and gotalk will also sell cobranded phonecards in the Australian market.
