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Pingo Offers Customers Free Calling To China And Vietnam During Chinese New
Year Celebration
Subscribers Get Fifteen Days of Free and Reduced-Rate Calling From Regular
Phones During Annual Spring Festival
BURLINGTON, MA - February 12, 2007 - 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
Taking advantage of The iBasis Network, Pingo enables consumers to
realize the cost-savings of VoIP or Internet telephony from regular fixed or mobile phones
without any need for additional hardware or software. Pingo offers consumers high-quality
long distance service on a prepaid basis, along with a host of convenient usability
features. Pingo customers save on calls to both landline and mobile phones in almost every
country. Mobile phone users in particular can save as much as 90 percent on international
calls by using Pingo's toll-free access and lower rates. Pingo minutes can be purchased
with credit and debit cards, as well as PayPay, at www.pingo.com. Customers can access Pingo from toll-free and
local access numbers in 35 countries, including the U.S., Australia, Canada, China, the
U.K., France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Russia, and Thailand.
About iBasis
Founded in 1996, iBasis (NASDAQ:IBAS) is a leading wholesale carrier of international
long distance telephone calls and a provider of retail prepaid calling services, including
the Pingo® web-based offering (www.pingo.com) and disposable calling cards that are
sold through major distributors and available at retail stores throughout the U.S. iBasis
customers include many of the largest telecommunications carriers, including AT&T,
Verizon, China Mobile, China Unicom, IDT, Qwest, Skype, Telecom Italia, and Telefonica.
iBasis carried more than 11 billion minutes of international voice over IP (VoIP) traffic
in 2006, and is one of the largest carriers of international voice traffic in the
world2. The Company can be reached at its worldwide headquarters in Burlington,
Massachusetts, USA at 781-505-7500 or on the Internet at www.ibasis.com.
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