PRO-TALK

Laurent has recently opened a piano showroom in Calais, France. He supplies Yamaha and Kawai brand pianos to retailers and consumers throughout Europe. He typically spends two to three hours on the phone with potential customers, telling them the specifics of each of his products. He also has a website but customers are keen on speaking to him personally before spending large amounts of money on his pianos. Some of his customers calling from abroad often complain that they cannot talk for too long as the cost of their phone bill may be higher than the cost of the piano!

Laurent recently heard about Pro-Talk through a friend of his, Ehsan, who uses it for calling friends and family abroad. Believing it to be too good to be true, Laurent decides to sign up for an account and purchases a London phone number because most of his international customers seem to be based in the United Kingdom. After reading through the Pro-Talk website, Laurent is able to configure his smartphone to use his new UK number. It takes him less than 5 minutes to set up! Still not able to believe the price of the phone number he purchased (it cost him only €3), Laurent decides to make a test call from his landline to his new London number. Sure enough, his mobile phone starts ringing! He decides he may as well answer his own call to test the voice quality and he is amazed to discover that it is just as good as – if not better than – a regular phone call!

Laurent decides to invest in five more numbers for other European cities and he puts all of these on his letterhead and company website. He can answer calls made to any of them on the single device – his mobile phone. Suddenly Laurent finds he is receiving a lot more calls from interested customers. And they are happy to talk to him for hours because they are paying local rates for calls to local numbers. For Laurent, the calls are free!

Ehsan works as a doctor in Birmingham, United Kingdom. He is originally from Karachi in Pakistan. While everyone back home seems to have a smartphone these days, unfortunately the relatively poor internet quality and constant power outages makes it frustrating to place free Skype or Viber calls to his friends and family in Karachi. His phone company offers very high call rates to Pakistan and he does not want to worry about his phone bill every time he calls home. Ehsan has purchased a number of calling cards but has generally found the call quality to be poor and he almost never seems to get the number of minutes advertised.

Ehsan decides that he may as well open an account with Pro-Talk. It's free and they seem to have excellent rates to Pakistan landlines and mobiles (less than 2p per minute!). He tops up his account by €5 and is instantly able to make phone calls on his phone and computer. He is impressed with the voice quality and so are his relatives back home – they no longer need to rely on their internet or electricity in order to receive the calls! What's more, his fiver seems to last forever and he can check his call history online to ensure he is paying for only what he actually uses. So impressed is Ehsan that he decides that in future he will sign up for one of Pro-Talk's call packages to avail of even further savings!

Brendan is a busy barrister who has a offices in Galway, Ireland and Dublin, Ireland. Being tech-savvy, Brendan has been using Pro-Talk for quite some time and consequently has no landline telephone in either of his offices. This is, in part, because he spends most of his days in court rooms and solicitors' offices and is rarely in his office to receive calls. Yet he spends much of his time talking to his clients and solicitors on the phone. Using his free Pro-Talk account he has purchased landline phone numbers for both Galway and Dublin. Because he does not always have internet access on his phone, he has set both numbers to be diverted to his mobile each time someone rings them. This means that he can answer them without being connected to the internet and this costs him just 4 cent per minute. When he is in his office and has Wifi access then he can answer the calls for free! (the same would apply if he had 3g/4g).

Brendan finds that his business has increased dramatically since he put these new landline numbers on his headed paper. His solicitors and clients no longer need to worry about calling his expensive mobile number. They pay only for the cost of calling the landline number, which in most cases is free. As far as Brendan is concerned, he now carries two offices in his pocket, and all for just €3.30 per month for each one!

David is an entrepreneur who has recently opened his own IT consultancy firm in Birmingham, United Kingdom. Things have started slowly and he has a few local clients. But he knows that if he is to succeed then he will need to attract clients from all over the United Kingdom and abroad. At a recent trade fair in London, David met Brian. Brian is the director of a large company based in New York. Brian mentions that his company is looking for IT consultancy services from firms with international ambitions which are able to keep his company updated on the latest technological trends.

When David returns to his office he sends a follow-up email to Brian but, unfortunately, receives no response. He decides that if his firm is to be taken seriously by larger companies then it will need to project a global image. He cannot afford to establish physical offices around the world but, after some extensive googling, he chances upon Pro-Talk and decides to create an account with them. He purchases phone numbers for New York, London and Sao Paulo. He puts these on his headed notepaper, website and email signature. He also decides to invest in some VOIP telephones which he gets at a reasonable price off Amazon. He prefers to use these over his smartphone because the smatyphone has poor battery life but also because it is well known that VOIP phones result in even higher voice quality. They arrive the next day and he is able to set them up in 10 minutes by following the simple instructions that came with them.

He later decides to email Brian again to say that he will be visiting New York and would be interested in continuing their previous conversation. Brian, upon seeing the contact details at the end of the email, is impressed and calls David on his New York number. He is surprised when David personally answers the phone and he asks David whether he is already in New York. David tells him that he is not in New York but is using VOIP technology to create global virtual offices in cities around the world. Brian has never heard about such a thing before and is highly impressed with David's knowledge and initiative. He wonders what else David might know that could help his company. He decides to invite David to his New York offices as soon as possible to discuss an IT consultancy contract.

In the following months, David receives significant interest from international firms and, before long, things are so busy that he will in fact open a new office in London. This he does with the help of his brother John, who works in the same industry and who is employed to manage the new office. David uses his Pro-Talk account to assign the London number he purchased a few months ago to John's smartphone. He is now able to make free phone calls between his own number and John's number and vice versa, meaning that internal office phone calls cost them nothing at all. This is the case even though the offices are based in different cities.

Claire is from Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is heading on an exciting three-month "round the world" tour as part of her gap year. This will include visiting parts of South America, Africa and Asia. Her parents are delighted that she has decided to explore the world but are terrified that she will be away for so long. They instruct her to make sure she has her phone with her at all times!

Claire has assured her parents that she is travelling with friends and that she will be fine, but she knows that they will be extremely concerned and will be calling her every night. As she will not have internet access in many of the countries she plans to visit, she estimates that the cost of the phone calls is likely to be very high and, while this is unlikely to stop her parents from calling, she is determined to find a solution to help them out. One of her friends tells Claire about Pro-Talk, a service which he used when he went on a similar holiday the previous year. Claire is amazed she has not previously heard of this and immediately signs up for an account. She decides to subscribe to a local Belfast phone number and forwards the number to her mobile phone. Her parents will now be able to contact her by simply dialling the local Belfast number from their ordinary landline phone, paying the price of a local call. The call will then be forwarded to her mobile phone no matter where in the world she is, and irrespective of whether or not she has internet access. All she will pay is the rate charged by Pro-Talk for forwarding calls to her UK mobile – which she knows is extremely cheap! And she also knows that there is no minimum contract so she can disconnect the service as soon as she returns from holiday.

Claire believes this is a great idea...and so does her boyfriend Mark who is not travelling with her but will similarly be able to take advantage of the local phone number to stay in touch with her.

Her parents are delighted and decide to take full advantage by calling her constantly throughout her holiday. Upon her return, they insist that she keep the number!

Annie lives in Durham, United Kingdom, where she is studying for a Masters in History at the local University. Her course attracts students from all over the world and, as a result, Annie has made friends with students of at least eight different nationalities. However, the year has flown by all too quickly and is almost over. Her friends will soon be leaving for their home countries and Annie would love to keep in contact with them. She knows she won't be able to contact them from her ordinary telephone as she would not be able to afford the cost (she is still paying off her student loans!). Some of them mentioned to her the advantages of using apps to stay in touch. Annie is not a big fan of the latest gadgets – she carries an "old school" mobile phone which is not capable of receiving Internet let alone downloading apps. And while she admits to enjoying the occasional game of "Snake" on her phone, Annie prefers the old fashioned telephone conversation to "social media".

One of her friends mentions "Pro-Talk" but this too seems to require Internet access for placing calls. When she looks into it, Annie discovers that, in fact, she can use Pro-Talk to make calls without any internet access. All she has to do is sign up for a free account and request Pro-Talk's Direct Access service. After that, she is assigned a local number which she can call from her ordinary landline (it costs her nothing to do this because her local calls are free as part of a subscription with a local phone company). When Annie dials the local number, she is asked for her Pro-Talk PIN and, once that has been keyed in, she can place calls to any phone in the world at pro-Talk's low rates. In this way, Annie is able to make cheap calls to her friends without either of them being connected to the Internet!

Despite spending considerably more time on the phone than she used to, Annie is amaze at how her phone bill has been slashed almost in half! She decides to treat herself by using the savings to buy some Internet!