Rebtel no longer blocked by O2, noisy approach payed off

Written on 4th September 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

About a week ago, I reported about Rebtel, a Luxembourg and Sweden-based start-up that provides cheap international mobile calls, had been blocked in Germany by operator O2. It didn’t look like it was going to be an easy fight for O2, as Rebtel blogger Alexander Drewniak wrote a post in which he promised Rebtel would fight back as hard as they could. Of course Alexander asked for help from the crowd, in the form of complaining by the operator. The crowd did so, and.., victory is Rebtel’s:

Without your personal support, blogging, Tweets, Diggs, Facebook status messages, emails to O2’s CEO and phone calls to their support staff we could never have made our voice loud enough for O2 to hear us. With the Rebtel community being able to come to terms with O2 on this matter we have proved that together we are strong. We held our ground and the persistency surely paid off.

So guess what, in these times, it sure pays off to make a lot of noise via the web and email. You’ll even get a giant like O2 on its knees.

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