3's WePay rewards users for taking calls
By Ryan Block 
posted January 24th 2006 10:08AM
posted January 24th 2006 10:08AM
Ok, so here's the gimmick: you sign up for
pay-as-you-go-service with 3 (they're a British carrier, remember?), and they pay you out airtime credits for getting
calls or texts from your mates. They call it WePay, and apparently a five minute call will net you credits enough for
two texts or an MMS (or a bit of mobile TV, if that suits your fancy); 100 minutes of calling or 50 texts will pay you
out £6 in credits. Seems like as long as they're keeping their margins high enough over the "discount"
provided with credit paybacks, doesn't sound like 3 should have much of a problem with this one -- that is, unless
everyone in England switches to WePay and no one calls each other anymore, expecting others instead to call them to
pump up their credits.
In Portugal we had something similar in the 90's from TMN, one of the cell networks..
At least until they launched a plan in which calls to TMN were actually cheaper than what the other plan would pay you, so people just bought 2 phones and make them call each other!
In Brazil we have something similar to this, from Brasil Telecom (one of the biggies of our telecom market). In their prepaid plans, for each minute of incoming calls you receive credit equivalent to an one-minute outgoing call in the next month.
Why do we pay so much for cell service in the US for sub-par service and in other countries they get great service and get PAID to use it?
o2 Germany (formerly Viag Interkom) has had €asycash for a while too...
Same principle: You get 1¢ per minute of received call.
T-mobile Germany and Comviq/Tele2 Sweden had this years ago, don't know if it still exists... Engadget is a really good site, but always has a too high US american focus.
Doesn't this mean you could set something up with GoText or a similar application, spam your phone, and net all the credits you could ever want?
Telstra in Australia give you one cent per minute for calls received
In Australia, Telstra prepaid customers get 5c credit for every minute someone calls them.
Here in Finland a provider was offering a similar service, S?t?, which I've had for about half a year now. The greatest tragedy is I got the service after my wife left a job where she got unlimited free calling on her work phone.
OLD NEWS MATES!
In Italy you receive 10cent per minute when you receive a call and you pay 10 cents to call ANY network! It's great!
In Sweden, and I'm sure in other places too, this idea has led to abuse. I remember reading about youngsters calling their mobiles from whatever phone they could get hold of in order to earn a few bucks.
Hate to say it again...in Australia, our major mobile carriers, Telstra, has had this thing for ages.