18 April 2006, www.myvoipprovider.com

The Betamax Group (VoIP Buster and 6 others) in Germany have launched yet another VoIP provider (www.poivy.com). This time they have changed their strategy and no longer offer free destinations, yet they do offer free calls. Now they are going the viral marketing route - the more new customers you refer the more free minutes you get (333 minutes or 5 Euro for each referal) to phone any destination for free.

What is the catch - well there is no catch. They even throw in a free VoIP-IN number available in a few countries and now any credit is valid for 365 days after the last purchase instead of only 120 days with all of their sister companies (VoipBuster.com, VoipCheap.co.uk, Netappel.fr, SipDiscount.com, VoipDiscount.com, Internetcalls.com, SparVoip.de and VoipStunt.com).

But, why on earth would anybody want to sign up with them. All of their sister companies offer "Free VoIP calls" to a much wider range of destinations and although Betamax do have the habit of changing their list of free destinations on average poivY is probably the most expensive of them all.

Unless you have a whole bunch of friends not using one of their sister companies already it is pointless.

Betamax are definitely not lacking ideas and are willing to test them in the real world. Poivy will probably only have a limited success, but the combined force of all peer companies will cause many headaches for other VoIP providers (Skype etc) in the extremely competitive international VoIP market.