How is the "Free" Paging Service from IDT Wireless?

Pocky asks: "A company called IDT Wireless is making a couple of pagers that use a calling-party-pays service model. They are making two models, Beep2Talk (numeric) and Beep2Talk Alpha (alphanumeric recieve-only). Today's Best Buy flyer appears to advertise the numeric model for a one-time fee of $39.95. Has anybody bought one of these pagers? Any ideas how this company makes money? They can't exactly ask the caller for a credit card number, can they? Perhaps the alphanumeric model requires you to send from a web site which displays ads, but this doesn't explain the numeric model. I may head to Best Buy to check them out and see if I can dig up any more info." Great, now it's even more affordable for companies to leash their employees to the job!

"This is from a press release on their web site:

The technology utilizes a proprietary "calling party pays" application which will eliminate the fees that subscribers are currently forced to pay for incoming pages and calls in the U.S. 'This technology is the culmination of more than four years of research and development on the part of IDT's Cellular Division engineers,' said Howard Jonas, IDT Chairman and CEO.

The rest of their web site is similarly vague. An AltaVista search and Google search revealed no further information on this company, so I tried calling the 1-800 number listed on their web site and was greeted by a message telling me to call back during normal business hours."

Comments

IDT

[M-2]

As a former employee of IDT, I wouldn't get this. In general, they run scams. A few years back, all their top admins quit rather than have a certain person get made manager. Since then the Internet service has gone downhill, the news server degraded severely, and account started disappearing at random. They also run Net2Phone, the company that sucked the life from the helpdesk by making the helpdesk do Internet AND Net2Phone support, and keeping the same 'service measurements'.

Sounds like another scam, like their 'we'll have the system read email to you if you use Net2Phone and call in using it!' service that never got off the ground.
----