Update: I received an email informing me that the Chinese New Year begins exactly at 9:00am U.S. PST on Feb. 18th for those in China and Vietnam. So now you can help celebrate the second it happens!

Pingo announces free calls to China and Vietnam from February 18 through March 4, 2007 to celebrate the Lunar New Year Festival season. Also known as Chinese New Year and the Spring Festival, the fifteen day period annually prompts the largest volume of travel and long-distance calling to those countries as Chinese and Vietnamese people worldwide honor the holiday’s traditional emphasis on family gatherings.

Pingo calls are carried over The iBasis Network -- the most extensive international Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) network in existence – directly serving more than 100 countries and enabling customers to enjoy the cost-savings of Internet telephony while using regular fixed and mobile phones.

"Pingo can help families that are separated by many miles to stay close throughout the year by enabling them to call more often and talk longer," said Ofer Gneezy, president and CEO of iBasis. "Because of the efficiency of our network and our buying power as a leading wholesale carrier we’re able to offer this special incentive to encourage those with family in China or Vietnam to join them for the holidays, at least over the phone, and then continue saving with Pingo."

Pingo customers in the U.S. can use Pingo’s local access numbers to call landline phones in China and Vietnam for free from February 18 through March 4. Customers using Pingo’s toll-free access, which is available in 35 countries (including the U.S.), or calling mobile phones in China and Vietnam will incur a nominal surcharge.

Available worldwide via credit card or PayPal exclusively through its multi-lingual website, Pingo’s calling card is a truly international product. Consumers can reach the Pingo platform and save on calls from 35 countries, view rates in more than 38 currencies, and make payments in four currencies. Pingo’s voice prompts are in five languages (English, Spanish, French, Chinese and Portuguese). Pingo online calling card also provides easy-to-use features such as PINpass PIN-less dialing, on-line call history reporting, and automatic recharging. A Refer-a-Friend program also offers customers a $5 bonus when someone they refer joins the service.

Pingo users also benefit from the service’s unique RateWatcher feature, by which iBasis continually seeks opportunities to lower its costs of international termination and pass the savings on to its Pingo international calling card customers. For example, in October of 2006, RateWatcher enabled Pingo to reduce calling rates to 125 countries by as much as 30 percent, and in January reduced rates to the Philippines, helping to make Pingo "the last calling card you’ll ever need."

iBasis, the Global VoIP company, is one of the world's leading wholesale carriers of international long distance telephone calls. Based on Telegeography projections and iBasis’ current annual run rate of approximately 12 billion minutes of traffic, the company carries an estimated 20 percent of the world’s international VoIP traffic¹. Record traffic periods, which regularly occur during major religious and national holidays such as Christmas, New Year’s, Mothers’ Day, Ramadan, Eid, Diwali, and Chinese New Year, demonstrate the scalability of The iBasis Network. Phone traffic over the iBasis network on these holidays typically increases by 30 percent or more over non-holiday traffic.