New cellphone services aim to cut costs for pre-paid users

BEIRUT: The Telecommunications Ministry has unveiled plans to launch two new cost-saving services to cellphone subscribers. The “Call Collect” and “Friend and Family” services are expected to significantly reduce call costs for prepaid phone subscribers, who are subject to rates three times higher than those with a billing subscription.
“There are a number of factors that [high prepaid phone rates] result from. Part of it is that phone services for cellular phones have a low market penetration rate, although this has risen by a factor of two and a half in the last year and a half as result of a reduction in calling rates by 20 percent, and through investments, and improving coverage and absorption,” said Telecommunications Minister Charbel Nahhas during a news conference over the weekend.
Nahhas jointly held the conference with the heads of Lebanon’s two mobile communications networks, Alfa and MTC touch.
“The [new services] are consistent with the goals that we work toward, and that we started in September 2010 by cutting night-time communication costs by rates between 20 percent and 40 percent for prepaid costumers,” said Nahhas. “And it paves the path to making third generation services accessible to Lebanese by the middle of the year 2011,” he added.

The “Friend and Family” service, expected to be available in “a matter of days,” will cut rates on phone calls to regularly contacted people by at least 30 percent. The subscriber will be able to list up to two phone numbers that the rate cuts will apply to.
The “Call Collect” service will enable callers to request the recipient to pay for the call. In the case of pre-paid phone subscribers, the services will reduce costs from 38 cents a minute to 12 or 14 cents.
Nahhas believes that the “Call Collect” service will meet “an active social need” by helping to transfer living costs from working classes to the financially comfortable segments of Lebanese society.