BY Oo Gin Lee

WHY pay 15 cents per minute for a mobile call when you can pay between two and four cents?

The rate buster: Net-telephony or Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services used on mobile phones.

Think services like Skype, StarHub's pfingo and Mediaring Mobile.

VOIP started off on the PC, but because the caller really only needs Internet access to initiate calling, he can also do so from today's Net-enabled, high-speed 3G and 3.5G phones.

Skype today works on Windows Mobile phones while pfingo and Mediaring Mobile works on most Nokia N and E series phones.

The high cost of mobile data charges made this proposition untenable in the past as you had to fork out an additional 40 cents to 50 cents of data charge for every minute of VOIP talk.

Not anymore. StarHub now bundles unlimited mobile Net plans with their cable broadband subscriptions and both StarHub and M1 offer unlimited 3.5G plans for $19.36 per month.

Bundle that with the $11 per month pfingo unlimited plan, and suddenly you have a $30 deal which gives you unlimited incoming and outgoing local calls.

Getting a comparable deal in the normal mobile world would set you back seven times more, like M1's $201.16 talk-all-you-can plan. That same 30 bucks would only net you 160 minutes worth of outgoing calls, like StarHub's $29.96 Power Call plan.

How about calling overseas to friends and family? These mobile VOIP services also offer super-cheap deals.

Mediaring charges seven cents per minute for calls to India while budget IDD services like StarHub's 018 service and M1's 021 costs 40 and 96 cents per minute respectively.

But you have to add another 15 cents per minute to the latter two as you have to incur the standard local airtime charge as well, since you are initiating the call using the mobile voice network. In the case of pfingo, Mediaring and Skype, you are using the data network, so you escape the extra charge (See page 6 for detailed rate comparisons).

Pfingo's 12 cents per minute rate for calls to India is higher than Mediaring's, but the former's two cents per minute to China rate beats the latter's three. Good news - you can install both pfingo and Mediaring in the phone and switch between them with a few deft button presses.

Of the three mobile VOIP services, pfingo is the only one that also issues you with a prefix-3 phone number, which works just like your normal prefix-6, 8 and 9 numbers. So when you use pfingo to call your friend, he will see your prefix-3 number on his call log and he can also call you back with his landline or mobile phone.

This article was first published in The Straits Times, Digital Life on 24 June 2008.

Related Links:

Making cents of VOIP services here