by Gene Retske
Why?
Callback. International Callback. Ever hear of it? It was a significant use for the AT&T Conversant in the 1990s. I had never heard of it either, until one day in 1993 in Miami when I was introduced to an Argentinean entrepreneur who wanted me to create one for him. When I left AT&T in 1992 after a twenty year career to strike out on my own, founding a Value Added Reseller company. As a systems integrator, it was our job to put together hardware, software, network services and whatever else, to create a system meet our customer’s needs.
We had created and sold interactive voice response systems for banking, tourism, automotive dealers and others. I thought I had heard it all, until I heard about International Callback. I have to admit, when the Argentinean first started laying it out for me, I thought maybe I was not hearing him right. After all, he spoke like an Argentinean, which he was, and I spoke a Puerto Rican dialect. He patiently explained what he wanted.
In a word, he wanted the ability for someone in Argentina to get U.S. dialtone from a service provider in the U.S., using U.S. carriers and U.S. calling rates. Got it? Well, neither did I until he laid out the numbers for me on a yellow legal pad. A call from Argentina to the U.S. was about $2 a minute, with a three minute minimum, for a total of $6 per call, assuming the call was answered on the U.S. end.
In those days, faxes were a common international communications method, and the vast majority were one pagers. A one page fax originated in Buenas Aires to New York, was thus charged at the minimum of $6, even though it probably transmitted in less than one minute. If we could somehow connect to U.S. dialtone, the same call would cost less than a dollar at U.S. rates. I will go through the economics of this in a future post.
But, how to get the Argentinean connected to U.S. dialtone without actually completing a call via Telintar, the government owned, operated and regulated Argentinean long distance company?
In addition to faxes, another group of heavy users, international business travelers, was a significant market. If originating an international long distance call on the foreign telephone company’s lines was expensive, making the call on a hotel telephone was even more costly.
At least one U.S. company, the International Discount Telephone company, founded by Howard Jonas, was offering a service to business travelers. For a fee, they would have an operator call your hotel at a designated time, and place calls for you. There were some obvious shortcomings, like the lack of an ability to place calls ad hoc; they had to be pre-arranged. It was also labor intensive, since a U.S. based operator had to place the calls to the subscriber, get the calling information, placing the calls and then monitoring to see if the call was still proceeding.
We’re just getting started, but where there is an opportunity to create a business with profit, the creative juices begin to flow.
Next – Technological challenges, and good ol’ U.S. creativity.
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